G8 Justice and Interior Ministers' Meeting: The Struggle Against Organized Crime, and Migration-Related Issues
29/05/2009
The G8 Justice and Home Affairs Ministers' Meeting has opened in Rome with the first two of the three working sessions planned. In the course of the first session, devoted to the fight against organized crime, the Ministers focused on the struggle against paedo-pornography and IT crime, as well as on strategies designed to deal a blow to mafia assets. In connection with the latter issue, Justice Minister Angelino Alfano, who is co-chairing the Rome security talks together with Home Affairs Minister Roberto Maroni, spoke of "an excellent beginning", underscoring the fact that "a very broad consensus has been reached" over the confiscation of mafia assets.
Nor was Interior Minister Maroni making any secret of his satisfaction over the G8 Ministers' convergence. Chatting with the media during a break in the working session, the Minister reported that Italy's proposal to target organized crime's assets,alongside the preemptive struggle against trafficking in drugs, weapons and human beings,"has been greeted with immensely positive acceptance by all of the delegations". Maroni added that "it has been a very concrete meeting, with very many proposals that will be reflected in tomorrow's final declaration".
The issues of immigration and of piracy were addressed in the course of the second working session.
The question of immigration, Justice Minister Alfano said, makes Italy "one of Europe's border zones", thus it is necessary to strengthen the tools of legal cooperation and the international arrest warrant in order to combat the traffic in human beings.
The Ministers also addressed the problem of piracy in the Gulf of Aden, an issue which Minister Alfano himself had requested to be added to the agenda of the interministerial talks. The goal is to come up with a transnational agreement on legal and investigative aspects and on the prosecutability of pirates, in order to combat a phenomenon which not only triggers insecurity and violence but which also causes serious financial and economic damage inasmuch as it targets commercial traffic.
In the late afternoon the Ministers gathered in the Aula Magna [Great Hall] of Rome's Palazzo di Giustizia, the headquarters of the country's supreme Court of Cassation, to attend a working session dedicated to the memory of Giovanni Falcone, the judge who best symbolizes the struggle against organized crime. The talks focused on the confiscation of mafia assets.
In the broader framework of the struggle against crime, the Interior Ministry today published a bilateral agreement between Italy and the United States "for strengthening cooperation in the fields of prevention and investigation to combat serious forms of crime". The agreement provides for the establishment of an automatic mechanism "for cross-searching and communication between data banks" so that information regarding DNA profiles and fingerprints can be shared.
The G8 Justice and Interior Ministers' Meeting will end tomorrow with a working session devoted to urban security and to the struggle against terrorism.
