THREE young men, wearing shorts, dark glasses and broad grins, pose proudly beside the cherry-red speedboat for a photograph. Each has one knee raised and a foot planted triumphantly upon one of the boat's three huge 250-horse-power engines, like jubilant fishermen with their catch. Except that this 10-metre (33-foot) craft is the prize of no amateur sport: the three men are off-duty Italian policemen, showing off the boat they seized the previous night after chasing a smuggler and his cargo of 35 illegal immigrants on their way from Albania to the Italian coast.

It had been a pretty average shift for a calm, still, autumn night. Between them, the police, the navy and the coastguards had picked up about 100 illegals off a 55km (35-mile) stretch of the coast north of Otranto, a small port in Apulia near the southern tip of Italy and the narrowest point of the Adriatic Sea: on a clear day here, you can see the Albanian mountains across the 70km channel. A mix of Albanians, Kurds from Turkey and Iraq, Bengalis, Pakistanis and Kosovars had been stashed inside the tiny wooden hold of this boat, the hatch firmly closed.


In order to seize the vessel, explains one of the young policemen with thinly disguised relish, they had crashed into it while it was trying to speed away. They had had no hesitation in doing this because the helmsman, an Albanian smuggler, had already dumped his cargo in the sea. This lot had been rescued by the coastguards; many others, less fortunate, simply drown. The smuggler himself had leapt overboard, but was hauled out of the water and, with his vessel, taken back to Otranto—to much admiration, and the triumphant photo session, next day.

Every night, a flotilla of Italian ships and power-boats speed up and down the coast, and to and from the bases they have now established, with Albanian government permission, in Albania itself. Every night, they find at least one boatload, sometimes up to 20 of them, each with a cargo of 30-odd smuggled people; sometimes, there are also drugs or automatic weapons stashed inside. In the eight months to the end of August, 21,000 illegals had been picked up along this short stretch of the coast alone, compared with 19,957 in the whole of the previous year.

For every person caught, reckons Captain Enrico Macri, the commander of the Otranto coastguards, another two or three will have waded ashore and slipped in undetected. And for every person shuttled across the sea, whether delivered safely or not, the smuggler pockets at least 1m lire ($540). With revenues like this, and using boats worth some 100m lire each, the trafficking of human beings, according to Willy Bruggeman, a deputy director of Europol, “is getting as profitable for criminal groups to deal in as other crimes such as drugs.”

In the past couple of years, the traditional range of contraband smuggled by organised criminals across borders in Europe—drugs, guns, stolen cars—has expanded to include human beings. Often, the same mafia rings deal in all these, and money-laundering. Whereas a few years ago organised criminals in cities like Antwerp and London came chiefly from countries such as Nigeria or Colombia, says Europol, the business now is as likely to be run by Russians, Albanians or Yugoslavs. It is the Russian mafia these days that is buying up property on the Spanish Costa del Sol with the proceeds.

The fastest-growing trade is in human beings. A conservative estimate by Jonas Widgren, of the International Centre for Migration Policy Development in Vienna, reckons that 400,000 people are smuggled into the European Union each year; others suggest that is simply the number of girls brought into the EU and forced into prostitution. Prostitutes from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova—and more recently from Kosovo and Albania—are trafficked to Berlin, London, Brussels, Milan and Amsterdam. Most of them are women under the age of 25, often lured with false promises of jobs as “dancers”, or abducted and sold for as little as $1,000, then beaten and forced to work for local pimps. An increasing number these days are young boys. The networks of people-smugglers reach from the highly organised Russian and Ukrainian rings to the smaller Albanian and Yugoslav cells.

Why they come

The rocky stretch of the Italian coastline near Otranto, often referred to as the “soft underbelly of the European Union”, exposes the contradictions and complexities of the EU's effort to seal its outer border against anything it does not want—whether guns, contraband cigarettes, cannabis, cocaine or people seeking a better life—while at the same time ridding its citizens inside of many of their everyday restrictions. One reason this bit of the border is so popular is its proximity to the war-battered Balkans across the sea. But it is also no coincidence that last year, when the numbers seized leapt so dramatically, Italy implemented the Schengen agreement (named after a Luxembourg border town), which dissolves the borders between its full members, and is now part of EU law.

Italy had long been a magnet, thanks to its geographical position, long coastline and famously lax approach to illegal immigration: it has a habit of granting mass sanatoria, or amnesties, every so often, and even the police admit that expulsion orders are seldom enforced. But, nowadays, once illegals are inside Italy, they face no more border checks throughout most of the rest of the EU.

The European project to create a single market, in which its citizens can move themselves, their money, goods and services freely around the Union, has dramatically altered the pattern of cross-border crime in Europe. By lifting internal barriers—at least between the full Schengen members, which do not include Britain and Ireland, nor, though it has at least signed the convention, Greece—the EU's members have pushed their border controls to the outer rim of the Union. By, in turn, tightening up that periphery, they have driven certain cross-border activities underground, sometimes sending even genuine refugees into the hands of criminals, who now traffic them for profit alongside illegal migrants. And, by creating a single internal market, Europe has also created for itself a new single market in crime.

Justice across borders

This tangled knot of problems will be discussed when the heads of the EU's 15 governments meet on October 15th and 16th in the Finnish town of Tampere for their first summit devoted exclusively to “justice and home affairs”. They will consider three subjects: immigration and asylum; the fight against cross-border crime; and the birth of a “European judicial space”. All this is designed to create “an area of freedom, security and justice”.

Though governments will dress up their discussion in grand declarations, much of what they will be saying is not new. Under the Amsterdam treaty, in effect since May, and an “action plan” agreed on last year in Vienna, the EU's governments have already committed themselves to the creation of a common judicial area. What is new, however, is the political will to push, promote and publicise what could turn out to be the boldest project towards European integration since the launch of the single currency.

Part of the idea is that Europeans, who in the words of Tarja Halonen, the Finnish foreign minister, “increasingly marry, work, study, buy and sell goods and services, and invest or borrow money, across their national borders”, should be able to seek justice simply and efficiently from any other EU country. The purpose is to protect Europeans from discrepancies in the law regarding, for example, the custody of children after divorce. But an even more pressing motivation is to fight organised cross-border crime.

Already, EU countries rely on each other for protection and security. Under Schengen, Germans must trust Italians to police the Italian stretch of the EU's borders; each Schengen member trusts the others when it comes to issuing visas to outsiders. The police are now allowed to chase a suspect caught committing a crime across a national frontier. In small ways, EU countries have also begun to recognise infringements committed in each other's countries: a driving-licence ban, for instance, in any EU country must now be enforced in any other.

This next project would take these principles further. At the least, it would mean stripping out a procedural layer that at present enables one member's courts to interpret a decision made by any other's before it is acted on. If the German police, for instance, want to seize the assets held by suspected criminals in Belgium, or to hold up a shipment of drugs they suspect are about to arrive there, they must first wait to get approval through a Belgian court. For organised crime, where the police need to move fast and where the criminal web reaches across borders, valuable time is wasted in following current rules, and more nimble criminals slip through the net.

Broadly speaking, Europeans are divided into those (like the British) who are keen simply on better co-operation within the current framework, and those (like the Italians, Belgians and Dutch) who would like fuller harmonisation. Interior ministries are also generally cooler about integration than are justice ministries. Elizabeth Guigou, the French justice minister, is a keen advocate of the creation not only of a European prosecutor's office but of a European federal court of judges to try cases that cross borders. The French interior ministry is distinctly icy.

For the moment, ideas about full harmonisation remain only a distant prospect. The Union's members not only have different criminal codes, but varying procedures too. Besides the different judicial traditions in the 15 EU countries, there are also no fewer than 120 police forces and dozens of separate legal jurisdictions, according to Ben Hall, research director at the Centre for European Reform, a think-tank in London. Harmonising these systems, laws and procedures into a single body of law, even were it politically desirable, would be technically nightmarish.

In the short run, however, EU governments are nonetheless committed to making cross-border European justice mean something. A practical way to do this, according to the British government, would be “to develop a regime where each state recognised as valid the decisions of another member state's judicial authorities...even though the decision has been taken under different laws and rules.” At present, an offence must be exactly the same in each country if a court in one is to comply with a request for, say, an order to seize assets in another. The idea now would be to align—“approximate”, in Euro-jargon—crimes, as well as judicial decisions taken before conviction, such as arrests, summonses to witnesses, orders for evidence or bail, warrants for search and seizure, and orders for the freezing of assets.

To help fight cross-border crime, one popular idea is to issue “Euro-warrants” for arrest. These would be issued by a court in one EU country but could be acted on by the police in another without first having to await an order from the court in the first country. Europol, now up and running and supposed to deal with EU cross-border organised crime, would like to go even further and set up a “Euro-just”. Along the same lines as Europol, this would be a pool of magistrates from the EU's 15 countries, available 24 hours a day to issue such a warrant. “If you have intelligence on a drugs transit, and need to act quickly, it's now impossible to reach a magistrate in another country at 1am,” says one Europol officer.

The harmonisers may well get some of what they want. One idea, backed by Romano Prodi, the head of the European Commission, is to set up a more limited EU prosecutor's office, to deal only with cases of fraud against the EU budget. Another popular idea, long pushed by the commission, is to criminalise across the EU the trafficking of human beings, which at present carries just a feeble penalty in some countries. After all, EU members have already agreed jointly to create the common offence of belonging to an organised criminal group. They have also agreed to make extradition easier. In the long run, a single European judicial area, as even the British admit, could put an end to the need for extradition altogether.

Fortress Europe

Nestling among groves of olive and eucalyptus near Casalabate, not far from the port of Brindisi, is the Centro Lorizzonte, one of two detention centres for illegal immigrants in Italy's south-east. Giuseppe Spedicato, from Movimondo, a voluntary group that runs the centre with only the scantest government finance, prefers to call it a “reception” centre. Though the police guard the building, it is still a home to those illegals picked up on the coast, while they await their fate. Residents have painted the walls of the yard with brightly coloured pictures. One, entitled “Kosovo”, shows a house and a tank. A dusty patch serves as a football pitch.

It is hard to say whether these are the victims or the beneficiaries of the trafficking in human beings. Smugglers now actively recruit “clients”. Moreover, along with the 650 adults in the centre, mostly Kurds, now that the rush from Kosovo has receded, there are 140 teenagers, almost all of them boys sent by their families to seek a better life in the West. Even if released, many would head north out of Italy. “There's nothing for me at home,” explains one 15-year-old Kosovar, in shorts and flip-flops, who wants to make it to Germany. Down in the yard, below his dormitory, a crowd of residents is jostling at the gate. Clasped in their hands are plastic bags filled with their few possessions. Some have received asylum papers, others expulsion orders to leave the country in 15 days. Will they go home? “They will probably all head to Germany,” says Mr Spedicato wryly.

Organisations that work with refugees protest strongly at the link often made between asylum-seeking, illegal immigration and crime. Now that the EU has virtually halted all primary legal immigration except for purposes of family unification, however, about the only ways into the Union are to slip in or stay on clandestinely, or to try for asylum. Some of the thousands of Slovaks, Romanians, Poles or even Russians on whom Berliners or Londoners now rely to cut their hair, clean their houses or serve them coffee have arrived legally on visas as students or au pairs, and stayed on illegally.

An untold number have crept in illegally in the first place, often with the intention of staying only a few years to earn cash to send home, drawn—as many generations of southern Europeans were long before Fortress Europe threw up its walls—by the higher wages of the north-west. Legal papers may be available periodically: France and Italy last year offered a mass amnesty to tens of thousands of illegals. Others will try to get legal papers as refugees.

The task for EU governments in Tampere is to find a balance between the desire to tighten up against bogus applicants and the need to protect genuine refugees and ensure that a common asylum policy guarantees minimum standards of welfare, legal aid or the right to work across the EU. With so many centre-left governments now in power across the Union, there is a strong desire to ensure that traditional liberal values should not be forsaken and that genuine refugees should be protected.

Even policy towards genuine refugees, however, causes bitter rows. Germany, which receives a disproportionate share of asylum applications, frets about “burden-sharing”. Along with Austria and the Netherlands, it has long pressed for a way of spreading refugees more fairly, to great resistance from France, Spain and Britain. One way would be to put in place a common application regime, in an effort to stop newcomers “shopping around” for the easiest way in or the best deal, in terms of welfare, housing and benefits. Under the present rules, a refugee must apply for asylum in the first EU country he arrives in. But many, like those who slip undetected into Italy by sea, still wait to lodge applications until they have reached a more attractive destination farther north.

Those who advocate a common regime—a similar standard of welfare for asylum-seekers, for instance—say it would stop such shopping around, and encourage applicants who arrive in southern Italy, say, to apply there and stay.

However, research suggests that refugees, whether genuine or not, do not seek the best deal, or head only to where the jobs are. They simply make for where they have family or friends, or where the “travel agent” who arranged for them to be smuggled happened to send them. A common asylum policy, and some sharing of responsibility, especially at times of crisis such as the Kosovo war, whether through a fund to spread the cost or via physical redistribution, makes sense. But, thanks to existing ties, no amount of harmonisation will stop migrants heading for the places they already go to.

Which is why Germany is so exercised about the policing of the EU's borders. It has already spent much money and effort reinforcing its border with Poland, which runs through forests and swamps, arming an increased number of border guards with infra-red detectors. Moreover, because of the proposed expansion of the Union to the east, Germany has been vigorously helping the Poles, as well as other “fast-track” applicants in Central Europe, to tighten up their own eastern borders. In five or six years' time, Poland's 1,000km border with Russia's Kaliningrad outpost, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, much of it rough forest, will be a large part of the EU's eastern fringe. That is where the next worry about cross-border crime lies.

Yet, no sooner is one EU external border semi-sealed than smugglers shift their routes. Europol says that thanks to tightening in the “buffer zone”—the Central European countries hoping to join the EU—the leaky points have shifted, to the borders between Scandinavia and the Baltic states and Russia, as well as to Italy and Spain. For as long as Europe is determined to fortify its borders, and shut out economic migrants, it may manage to keep the good guys out, but the bad will always find a way in.

Back in Otranto, the coastguards know they face a near-impossible task. The Italian government has reinforced the numbers of boats on patrol, and sent more policemen to the area. But, no sooner have they caught one lot of illegals and put them on the boat back to Albania than another boat with its pitiful human cargo hidden perilously inside will be on its way towards the coast again. “It's like torture every night,” says Captain Macri. “The most awful thing is that you are talking about human lives: it's a human tragedy.”