Examination of Witnesses (Questions 134
- 139)
WEDNESDAY 18 JUNE 2008
Mr Tim Wilson
Q134 Chairman:
Mr Wilson, you have been extremely patient, sitting at the back
listening to our earlier deliberations. You are most welcome.
I think you have heard the comments I made at the beginning about
this being on the record and that we are grateful for written
evidence, particularly if, after, you feel you have not said as
much as you would like to. So let me begin. In your view, what
is needed to support improvements in law enforcement capability
within the EU, particularly in terms of the exchange of information,
building capacity and translating analysis into effective preventative
action?
Mr Wilson: My Lord Chairman, if I may,
I would rather like to quote Professor Lodge where she referred
to Europol as an "increasingly visible spider in the web
of many supranational and national agencies". However, I
would caution two issues around resources and time. It is a fairly
small budget in the scale of law and order criminal justice expenditure,
and you have heard a lot in the previous session about cultural
differences. It will take time to begin to ensure more effective
co-operation. So, I guess, if I was writing an open letter to
the next Director General of Europol or the Chairman of the Management
Board, I would be fairly modest in what I was expecting the organisation
to do. I think, reading the transcripts, there has been quite
a lot of discussion about the top end of international crime,
and the important work that Europol and SOCA are doing in engaging
with quite a small amount of the criminal activity that is out
there. I think this is a case where the statistics have to be
treated with great caution. One can never rely on criminological
or criminal justice data giving a real impression of what is going
on, but I think we have to kind of fit this top end of criminal
activity in the wider market. Most crime is extremely local. When
we look at crime that is investigated forensically, particularly
the use of DNA, probably about 75 per cent—it is a bit more
than that—actually occurs and is solved around people who
all live in one police area. Then you have about 25 per cent or
so where there is movement across an internal English and Welsh
police area. We know we have about 10 per cent of prison places
occupied currently by foreign citizens. There is a huge amount
of activity going on out there, and I think that while you have
discussed organised and serious crime quite a lot so far in your
proceedings, I think that I would one must put a lot of emphasis
on continuing Europol's facilitation of bilateral and multilateral
exchanges between forces[26],
where I agree that it is actually harder to establish governance.
The kind of work that Europol does, which is quite a small injection
of its resource, in areas such as providing, training, secretariat
and meeting facilities for the European Police Chiefs' Task Force,
is perhaps a kind of activity that might be expanded. I think,
also, within the European Union there are opportunities to expand
the arrangements for exchanging data, particularly so that people
know the reliability for robustness of data by, perhaps, forming
working groups and training. Another thing I refer to in my evidence
was engagement with the wider community. Transparency, accountability
and corruption are very, very big issues, clearly, for us all
and it is something that we do need to look at in the context
of the increasing power of organised crime to penetrate legitimate
businesses and for Europol, perhaps, to brief legitimate businesses,
perhaps through its exchange with parliamentarians and with broader
public engagement—all of which I think will improve governance,
transparency and accountability—particularly with the European
Parliament, through the Lisbon Treaty and under the new constitution
for Europol, and perhaps increasingly working with joint committees
with national parliaments, because the bulk of trans-national
offending is, I think, going to be a matter for national police
on a bilateral or multilateral basis, rather than on a pan-European
basis. So I think there is an awful lot to do but the resources
are limited and we must expect proportionate results from that.
I do not think it is a question of piling more and more resources
in because to use resources effectively is going to take time
because of the kind of cultural issues—not necessarily national
identities but issues such as the different structures for criminal
justice criminal investigation (the different roles of investigating
magistrates compared with our own Crown Prosecution Service)—that
people have to get their heads round if we are talking about co-operation
even within the European Union. Then there is a whole issue, particularly
for a country like the UK, about third party countries where I
think Europol needs to be engaged but also needs to be engaged
quite equally with Interpol.
Q135 Lord Dear:
Mr Wilson, thank you for coming. Picking up on your earlier remarks
about most crime being local (but you then went on, quite rightly,
to refer to national cross-border crime), I wonder if we could
ask you for your views on, first, the definition in terms of trans-national
crime, on the one hand, and international, organised crime on
the other, and the fact that, I think, if I understand your evidence
correctly, you think Europol has not focused enough on the heavy,
organised international crime, and has focused on simply that
which crosses borders, and maybe at a lower level. Can we have
your views?
Mr Wilson: I am sorry if I have given
that impression. I think that there is an important focus on organised
and serious crime within Europol as one of its main tasks, but
I think that if it is going to have a major impact on the lives
of ordinary citizens, particularly in terms of acquisitive crime,
it does need to provide support to national police forces, regional
and local police forces in order to facilitate more effective
international co-operation. In some cases it may just be a question
of ensuring that a senior investigating officer with a problem
is put in touch with someone who can assist in a relevant force
in another country. I think that is very much the bread and butter
work of the national units at The Hague. I think there is a great
danger that that kind of work may be overlooked, whereas I think
the majority of Europol's more operational activity (the work
in the AWFs) is going to be focused on the upper end of criminal
activity—serious and organised. I think I may have given
you a slightly misleading impression.
Q136 Lord Dear:
We both recognise cross-border international crime of varying
levels—some of it very serious indeed. Are you saying that
Europol should or could have a role in addressing a problem which
resides within the boundaries of one particular country?
Mr Wilson: No. It is in assisting a problem
that has materialised in one particular country but where there
is a trans-national element in the materialisation. It is probably
a bilateral issue or it is a multilateral issue.
Q137 Lord Dear:
Could you give a theoretical or hypothetical example?
Mr Wilson: I think the Foiurniret case
is a good example, where a Frenchman living in Belgium committed
seven murders on the French and German border and, until an intended
victim escaped, the French and Belgian authorities were not aware
that they had a serial killer on the loose. I think there is a
role for Europol to assist co-operation across boundaries perhaps
on a bilateral/trilateral basis. Similarly, there was an exercise
in Belgium that illustrated, through the use of DNA, close connections
between people undertaking robberies in Germany, Belgium, France
and the Netherlands, in order to identify and co-ordinate national
police investigations.
Lord Dear: I now understand. Thank you for that.
Chairman: We will not enlarge on DNA at this
stage because we will come to it later.
Q138 Lord Mawson:
Why should we invest in large-scale information processing when
we can beat serious criminals on a case-by-case basis using bilateral
channels?
Mr Wilson: I partly put this down to
improving notoriously unreliable statistics, but we do need to
have some idea of what is happening out there, just as important
achievements are certainly documented for the solving of major
crimes on a case-by-case basis. What happens after a particular
organisation has been taken out? There is an interesting case
from the Lithuanian border in about 2004 where there was major
disruption of cigarette smuggling from Kaliningrad into the European
Union via Lithuania, and suddenly people detected there was a
change in the number of Lithuanian smugglers who were being arrested
on the border because there had been success in taking out the
bigger organisation, and local criminals had kind of filled the
gap. The thing about supply and demand is, if there is an opportunity,
removing a serious threat on a successful case operation may leave
a void that will be filled by other criminals, and I think that
one has to balance the activity that is taking place in terms
of serious individual investigations with trying to keep an idea
of what is happening generally in terms of criminal activity on
a spatial basis.
Q139 Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts:
I was very interested in your phrase "effective business
processes" which you use on page 3 of your evidence to us,
because as we have already discussed this morning, gathering more
and more data without the means to use it effectively, obviously,
has its drawbacks. You went on to talk here about the DNA exchange,
and then raised, further on, some of the difficulties—technical,
legal, etc—that are faced. Could you tell us a bit more
about where we are with this, how these problems were addressed,
whether we have got past the pilot stage, and perhaps also, if
this project is going to be successful, can it be extended to
other areas or is it confined to DNA?
Mr Wilson: I think the key lesson from
this was the process of trying to understand the business process
necessary to effectively co-operate using DNA across international
borders, which meant bringing together forensic scientists, police
officers and various lawyers in order to reach agreement on the
objectives. This was very much influenced by Mr John Dickinson.
You will remember the death of his daughter, and how DNA was instrumental
in finding her killer, but, as he put it in a number of lectures
he has given, that was by "accident rather than routine",
and what we wanted to address was how could we make the use of
DNA, where it maybe relevant to solving a serious crime like that,
take place as a matter of routine rather than by accident. DNA
has a global database[27].
I think there is one big reservation about a global database:
if you populate a database in Lyon you are putting quite sensitive
material (it is not quite so sensitive as it may seem but I think
there is an issue of public confidence) into the control of an
entity outside the national government that has been responsible
for authorising the collection of that information. As I said
earlier, if you take the view that most crime is local why are
going to put it in Lyon in the first place? It is much better
to keep it close to where it is going to enable you to solve crimes.
Also, and this reflects the different structures of investigative
responsibilities in different jurisdictions, the report by Mr
Peter Lewis on the lost Dutch Disk[28]
explained that one of the reasons for that particular exercise
was a very clear statement by the Dutch Government that they could
not exchange data through Interpol because Interpol is a police
body and yet the DNA database in the Netherlands—which is
a very good database—is actually owned and controlled by
the Ministry of Justice, and it is quite complicated to move information
around. So within those parameters the group came together and
said: "How can you exchange information in a way that is
likely to speedily assist investigations when there are reasons
to think, in a serious crime, that DNA may be helpful and how
do you ensure that the process is reliable and robust and also
complies with a quite different range of laws governing the use
of DNA in different jurisdictions?" Basically, it came down
to a quite simple process of a standardised request for information
that could be sent in the form of a quite simple, quite short
email from a single national point to another single national
point, and there would be a fairly quick response to say the request
for information has been received, so that whoever was waiting
for information helpful to the investigation would know that something
was happening out there, and the aim was to get information back
within a matter of days and give a very simple basic message to
say: "Yes, we have a DNA profile on our database which may
be able to assist your investigation", at which point it
would be possible to decide in terms of operational priorities,
priorities within the individual investigation, whether it is
appropriate to investigate that possible lead That is where the
single national contact point, I think, is important because each
contact team, if everyone is talking about automated systems,
will contain a forensic scientist who is giving advice on the
basis of a fairly good knowledge of the countries it is dealing
with about the quality and reliability of the DNA system used,
including issues such as the quality of forensic material recovery
from scenes, DNA processing, the processing system they use (which
can quite considerably affect the reliability of any matches or
not) and the significance of a match which depends on how many
alleles match[29].
So there is quite a lot of forensic interpretation needed to ensure
that although DNA looks like quite hard information, when you
get information about a match it may be, actually, not quite so
hard as you think, depending on that kind of factor. Then, obviously,
there needs to be advice to the investigating teams to think about
the context in which it is acquired when it comes to the MLA stage
of the investigation.
26 Note by the witness: This, as described
with specific examples in our memorandum, is international cooperation
between local, regional and national police forces, but excluding
specialist serious and organised crime agencies like SOCA. Such
cooperation by non-specialist police forces and agencies will
be the only possible response to by far the greater part of transnational
offending, including many activities that if the perpetrators
can be detected may be discovered to be organised as well as serious
in nature. Back
27
Note by the witness: The DNA Gateway run by Interpol at
its Headquarters in Lyon. Back
28
Note by the witness: "DNA Profiles Disk Inquiry",
a report dated 14 May 2008 by Mr Peter Lewis, Chief Executive,
Crown Prosecution Service, Back
29
Note by the witness: For example, within the UK a match
based on the analysis of samples using the SGM Plus® marker
system indicates that there is a probability of no less than one
in a billion that, unless the samples were obtained from family
members, the two DNA profiles came from different individuals.
A match between a UK profile and one held outside the UK based
on a different marker system, involving only some of the alleles
used for SGM Plus®, will necessarily reflect a lower level
of probability than this and in some cases could result in multiple
candidate matches with the profiles of a number of different individuals. Back
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