here - Cooperazione Italiana allo Sviluppo

d) Investigative and judiciary co-operation and controls“The frontiers are open for everyone except for the police”: although a bitsarcastic, this could be the synthesis of the situation of the investigative andjudiciary co-operation in European countries.Notwithstanding the numerous collaboration relations started, there remainlegislative and applicative differences from which the criminals seek to profit: anexample is the different legislation regarding the possibility of undertakingpersonal x-rays of those who are suspected of transporting drugs, on which there isa lack of one common law for all of Europe.Even the investigating and judiciary collaboration between Nigeria and Italyresults in being a decisive element, if one wants to increase interventions ofprotecting the victims and their families, and identify the people responsible for thetraffic of minors and women for sexual exploitation who are to be found in thecountry. At the same time such collaboration between the destination countries andNigeria would permit better cross check controls on transfer of funds with themoney transfer and/or controls of visas and passports.In general, however, it is indispensable to increase the amount of controls at thetop, as one cannot think of fighting against organised trans-national crimeundertaking verifications and controls exclusively from the bottom: the control, forexample, on the people receiving the money by money transfer would permitshedding a light on how this system is used and what are the connections andinternational relations of Nigerian criminality.Also extremely useful would be more attention to the issuance of visas and to aserious control of the documentation presented to obtain these. One could imagineindications on the part of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the embassies indifferent countries, so as to increase the attention given to some visas which couldbe considered sensitive: for example diplomatic representatives in Nigeria shouldgive greater attention to visas issued for tourism to young women or collectivevisas. At the same time the Nigerian Government could increase the controls ontheir officials involved in issuing passports, avoiding in this way the carelessnesswhich favours the possibility of having the availability of multiple documents.Better European cooperation is indispensable (considering that today it issufficient to enter into one of the Schengen countries to have access to all thecountries of the European Union), giving life to a common policy on immigrationin which the questions are dealt with at the community level and not as nationalproblems of the single country where major exposure is to be found to a particularmigratory pressure.Of undoubted usefulness is to continue along the road of computerising theservices and of a better transfer of information: if each passage of the border with acertain document is registered, one could always verify at each successive passagewhich movements that document has made and with what personal data. Accordingto many of those interviewed, in many cases the loss or thefts of documents inforeign countries are not communicated by the embassy to the offices in theterritory of the country of origin.