Roundtable on Promoting Integrated Border Management (IBM) in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa

On 10-11 Septebmer 2013, the Directorate General for Development and Cooperation (DG DEVCO) of the European Commission organised a roundtable on “Promoting Integrated Border Management (IBM) in Latin America and sub- Saharan Africa”, with support from the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD).

The European Commission defines Integrated Border Management (IBM) in the context of its external cooperation as “national and international coordination and cooperation among all the relevant authorities and agencies involved in border security and trade facilitation to establish effective, efficient and coordinated border management, in order to reach the objective of open, but well controlled and secure borders”.

The EU’s support to IBM and the fight against organised crime was recently evaluated, providing useful inputs for future EU cooperation in this area. The evaluation covered EU aid delivery over the period 2002-2010.

The main objective of the roundtable was to discuss how to implement the evaluation recommendations in future EU cooperation with Latin America and Sub-Saharan, bearing in mind that the recommendations were developed primarily based on assessments of EU assistance to countries of the EU neighbourhood. The roundtable therefore aimed to contribute to strengthening the quality of future EU-funded IBM interventions in Africa and Latin America.

Some of the key recommendations from the IBM evaluation which the roundtable aimed to consider included:

- The need to ensure a better balance between security and facilitation of traffic and trade in EU support, as previous EU interventions were found to have suffered from an imbalance with disproportionate attention paid to strengthening security at borders;

- The importance of further promoting the potential of IBM as a genuine development tool among policy-makers and external cooperation staff;

- The need to clarify and strengthen the links between IBM interventions and policies and strategies related to other areas, notably Security Sector Reform (SSR), migration and trade facilitation, in particular in relation to regional economic integration;

- The need to strengthen the EU capability for the delivery of high quality standards and make greater use of the possibilities to promote EU values in border management. This includes promoting the use of common and high quality standards in the customs sector, and promoting ethical standards and respct of human rights of migrants and other travellers at the border.

The roundtable gathered around 50 participants including European Commission and European External Action Service (EEAS) staff and selected external experts from partner countries and organisations, international organisations, EU Member States and other donors, non-governmental organisations, think-tanks and academia.

The final report and agenda of the roundtable as well as all PowerPoint presentations made at the event are available below. The final report contains a detailed summary of the main recommendations to emerge from the discussion.