EU-funded innovative projects support the European Ports Alliance

The recently launched European Ports Alliance public private partnership held its first workshop on Friday 12 July 2024 in Brussels, on the topic of innovation to fight drug trafficking through ports.

The EU is facing an unprecedented health and security challenge, with cocaine and synthetic drugs emerging as primary concerns. Maritime transport remains the primary route for cocaine trafficking to Europe. Europol’s joint analysis report with the Security Steering Committee of the ports of Antwerp, Hamburg/Bremerhaven and Rotterdam sheds more light on how criminal networks manage to infiltrate ports for drug trafficking. The report underlines the importance of integrating security features in port infrastructure. It also recommends enhancing international exchange of information, which is one of the aims of the European Ports Alliance.

The European Ports Alliance was launched in January 2024 as a flagship initiative of the EU Roadmap to fight drug trafficking and organised crime>, adopted by the European Commission on 18 October 2023. It is a public-private partnership gathering authorities from EU Member States, the European Commission, several EU agencies, port operators, shipping associations, and customs and law enforcement authorities. Its aim is to combat organised crime and drug trafficking by improving security in ports.

The four current areas of focus (called “clusters”) of the European Ports Alliance are improving operational cooperation between all stakeholders involved, the fight against corruption and infiltration of organised crime in ports, policy implementation and the role of innovation to increase the resilience of ports against organised crime and drug trafficking through. The cluster on innovation was the first to hold a workshop.

The participants of the workshop included representatives of European ports, shipping companies, associations, customs, law enforcement agencies, EU institutions and relevant EU-funded research Consortia. Discussions centred on the importance of technology and innovation in the fight against organised crime and the need to build capacity. The opportunity for EU Member State authorities to participate in EU-funded research consortia and to pilot innovative technologies was also underlined as a chance to develop capabilities that really fit the needs of practitioners.

In the course of the workshop, several EU-funded security innovation projects presented the new technologies they are developing, which may be able to support European ports, law enforcement and customs authorities in the future. One of them was BorderSens, a recently closed project which developed a portable device for electrochemical detection of drugs to scan cargo containers arriving in ports. The SilentBorder project on the other hand is developing an imaging technology based on cosmic ray tomography, whereas METEOR aims to new technologies to detect substances in the air of cargo containers. The SMAUG and UNDERSEC projects are researching the use of underwater drones and sensors to scan the hulls of ships arriving in ports for hidden cargo, whereas ENTRANCE works on a toolbox for risk-based non-intrusive inspection to limit unnecessary physical inspections, which disrupt business and threaten supply lines. FALCON develops new, data-driven indicators and tools to detect, track and investigate corruption, while ARIEN employs explainable-artificial-intelligence methods to understand, detect, analyse and track drugs trafficking chains. Others are developing sensor and data analysis technologies to support ports to improve their security.

More Information

• European Ports Alliance: factsheet and press release
• EU funding of research in the civil security for society cluster of Horizon Europe: Security research funds and Cluster 3: Civil security for society.