Today, December 15, the Ministry of Internal Affairs organized the first Eastern Forum on security and border management. Police chiefs, border police chiefs and high level officials from more than 10 countries on Europe’s eastern border participated at the Forum.
Discussions within the Forum focused on 3 main panels, which focused on security and border management; boundaries, models and standard operations in overlapping crisis management; pressing needs to deal with crises; law enforcement experiences in crisis management and lessons learned.
Topics discussed include the need for new forms of law enforcement cooperation in Eastern Europe and the EU, adapted to current risks and threats, aimed at rapid exchange of information and knowledge, secure cross-border communication networks and systems.
The participants also agreed on the importance of sharing the experience of the Moldovan authorities with international authorities, in terms of preventing and combating hybrid and asymmetric tactics, used at the governmental level, to disrupt democracies by antagonizing the population and weakening state institutions.
Another important conclusion of the Forum is that countries in the Eastern Security Belt should emphasize and raise awareness of the long-lasting effects of war, thus calling for a paradigm shift in home affairs policies, with contributions and actions common to and from all stakeholders.
At the same time, officials from countries participating in the Forum underlined the importance of developing the EU security Hub as a common strategic, tactical and operational framework for fast, secure and continuous law enforcement cooperation, in terms of information sharing, mutual legal actions, connecting regional knowledge with state-of-the-art technology, removing barriers to investigations and evidence collection (i.e. language, limited capabilities, etc.).
Likewise, officials decided to Envisage collective mechanisms (common tools, common databases, and joint recognized procedures) for identifying, collecting and sharing evidence, including digital, with already determined and tested instruments aimed at jointly coping with threats and incidents from explosion, chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear attacks.