Enhancing international police cooperation against migrant smuggling in North Africa The proposed regional Action aims to strengthen law enforcement¿s capacity across North Africa to effectively investigate and prosecute organized crime groups engaging in migrant smuggling. Increased efforts are needed in light of the professionalization of migrant smuggling, witnessed by law enforcement across the region, which indicates that the trade is increasingly taken over by organized crime groups, as opposed to loosely organized informal networks and facilitators driven by ad hoc opportunities.&nbsp;When smuggled by organized crime groups, migrants are a mere commodity and organized crime groups operate with migrants as with any other commodity. As a result, effective law enforcement action against organized crime groups engaging in migrant smuggling will be similar to actions against any other type of organized crime groups. Moreover, as these organized crime groups act increasingly transnationally, law enforcement action needs to resort to international cooperation similar to that against classical transnational organized crime.&nbsp;The key to success is therefore police information: as much quality police information as possible, shared as widely as possible across the region and beyond, analysed to make it actionable, and brought in timely fashion to front-line officers, including in the framework of operations.&nbsp;The proposed Action will contribute to building the capacity of law enforcement actors across North Africa to more efficiently investigate and prosecute organized crime groups engaging in migrant smuggling through enhancing their capacity to gather, manage, share and exploit police information, in particular through structured international cooperation. In addition, it will contribute to disrupting organised crime groups and identifying new groups through targeted police operations.&nbsp;The proposed Actions builds on previous experiences developed in the field of law enforcement under the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa ¿ North Africa Window (EUTF-NOA) and other ENI-funded regional programmes and will seek to develop synergies with ongoing and future programmes in the area of border management and anti-migrant smuggling. &nbsp;It is foreseen that the Action will be implemented in indirect management with a specialised inter-governmental organisation, namely INTERPOL. INTERPOL is the only global law enforcement cooperation organization with 194 member countries, including all North African countries, who have a combined 351 years of operational cooperation through INTERPOL. All INTERPOL member countries are connected through a secure global police communication system, which allows secure sharing of police information through a dedicated office at national level (the `National Central Bureau¿). A neutral membership-based organisation, INTERPOL routinely facilitates technical police cooperation away from the spotlight, including between countries that otherwise may not openly cooperate.&nbsp;The proposed Action is fully in line with priority area 2 of the Multi-Country Migration Programme for the Southern Neighbourhood, which specifically identifies combatting migrant smuggling and criminal groups engaging in it as a key strategy to strengthening migration and asylum governance and management in partner countries.&nbsp;