ERRU:Impact on cross-border cooperation Ad Hellemons Director TISPOL Organisation

Brief Introduction TISPOL  TISPOL: Europees Network for Traffic Police (EU 27 +Norway, Swiss)  Focus on road safety and fight against crime  Cross-border police cooperation (exchange good-practice, training, seminars, control operations, lobby)  Cooperation with external stakeholders  IRU/ECR/TISPOL cooperation 

Road Transport Enforcement  Difficult issue for TISPOL  In spite of EU legislation (Regulations) considerable differences in enforcement in the M.S.  Complex: rules complex, digital tacho fraud, dealing with foreign drivers, many different documents  Few experts available, due to complexity and resources required to come/remain at expert level

What does TISPOL try to do about it?  Truck and bus control operations  Transport Document System (TDS)  Master classes  Tachoweb (expert system tacho fraud)  Joining Eu working groups/expert committees  Full cooperation with ECR  Cooperation with Industry (IRU/ECR/TISPOL)

ERRU  TUNER Project (TISPOL/KLPD/ECR/IRU)  Blueprint for ERRU  Missed opportunity: inter-connection of national systems instead of EU database  Political decision. TUNER warned for the potential risks.  Complex, expensive and leaves too much room for interpretation and ignoring by M.S.  ERRU system design could have forced more into the direction of harmonisation (also: software checking tacho)

What could be the added value?  Improvement of definition of bad behavior  Removing bad companies, persons from the sector  More unified approach by law enforcement  More serious threat to operators that hide behind foreign borders  A strengthened feeling of working all together for law enforcement

But:  It is a pity that a -potentially- so powerful signal to bad behaving companies and persons is weakened so much by the way the instrument is organised and implemented. It could have been so much more powerful, if the M.S. would have organised the ERRU in such a manner that differences in technology, interpretation, decision-making etcetera would have been more ruled out by the design and working of the system itself.  Identical discussion: software on interpretation of readings of digital tachograph (different interpretations means different enforcement)

Battle difficult to win for law enforcement  Many people and organisations in law-enforcement work hard on harmonisation of practices, but as long as there is no real political will in the M.S. to achieve harmonisation it is a very difficult fight.  There are so many ways to escape, that the work that is done has only a limited effect.  Sometimes naive assuptions about capability of enforcement (group of wise men/new cabotage rules)  If the situation does not change, more and more people in law-enforcement will get demotivated and stop their efforts. This effect will be reinforced by financial problems.

TISPOL... working together to save lives Thank you for your attention Brussels BIVV