Italy wins a European Project on the Fight against Illicit Traffic of Stolen Vehicles

In January 2010 under the Community Programme “Security and Safeguarding Liberties – Prevention of and Fight against Crime”, the European Commission Direction General Freedom, Security and Justice agreed upon the funding to the Project “Good Faith: fight against illicit vehicle traffic and hit notification system”. The official project partners are the Italian Ministry of the Interior - S.I.R.E.N.E Office, the project leader, N-S.I.S. Office and Formez. Interpol, Europol, the Italian Traffic Police and the Traffic Control Authority will also be involved in the implementation of the project activities.
The ultimate objective of the project is to define a shared procedure for the registration and repatriation of stolen vehicles within the Schengen area, to be pursued through the application of article 102 bis of the Schengen Convention and of the PRUM Treaty. In particular, the project aims at pursuing

1. operational results: identification of common problems of investigation and related methods for resolution; research and mapping of illicit flows in the light of article 102;  identification of the weaknesses in national and international regulations which render cooperation between states difficult;
2. technical results: developing solutions through the use of Information Technologies in compliance with article 102 bis of the Schengen Convention (EC Reg 1160/2005) which rules access to SIS by the offices in charge of vehicle registration and the PRUM Treaty;
3. procedural results through: identification of common procedures to streamline the repatriation of the stolen vehicles which are found abroad;  identification of regulatory problems which effectively render cooperation difficult and inhomogeneous; identification and harmonization of potentially non-uniform procedures.

Among the activities planned, the project envisages about seven study visits in other European countries during which some of the questions to be discussed by the conference will be defined, and the preliminary documents to be distributed among participant countries will be elaborated. The following is also foreseen: the organization of a three-day international conference to be held in Rome, the drawing-up of a publication to be presented in Brussels and finally, a final conference for the diffusion of the results and the assessment of the application level of the agreed procedures. Formez will contribute to the realization of the project activities as well as to the financial, administrative and logistic management.