Mr. Sadik Ahmetović, BiH Security Minister, Mr. Roland Gilles, French Ambassador to BIH, and Mr. Holger Schroeder, the Head of Operations in the EU Delegation to BIH, opened a TAIEX workshop to discuss the EU legislation in the area of human trafficking and organised crime”.
During a two-day workshop attended by representatives from across the region, discussions will focus on the ways to improve coordination and cooperation between prosecutors, police and civil society, as well as to raise awareness of law enforcement agencies and members of the judiciary as to the recent trends in child trafficking and transnational crime.
In his introductory remarks, Minster Sadović reiterated that ever since the Action Plan for Combating Human Trafficking was adopted twelve years ago, BiH had been seeking to address this security problem through joint activities of governmental institutions and civil society.
„This approach has yielded a series of successful results that are reflected in the number of successful investigations, indictments and convictions of human traffickers. It is also reflected in the number of victims saved and the measures of support and assistance provided to the victims of human trafficking, a number of preventive activities and established mechanisms of internal and international cooperation“, said Ahmetović. Those efforts and outcomes of the fight against human trafficking have been recognised by relevant international institutions as well.
The workshop has been organised by the Bosnia-Herzegovina Ministry of Security in cooperation with the Technical Assistance and Information Exchange Instrument (TAIEX) and the French regional technical adviser for combating human trafficking in South-Eastern Europe.
This is the first event Bosnia-Herzegovina has organised as a presiding country of the MARRI regional initiative since it assumed the duty three weeks ago. In the course of the workshop, Minister Ahmetović and MARRI Regional Director Trpe Stojanovski discussed future activities in the course of the one-year BiH presidency.
