EU: Faster, further, higher: How EU police forces cooperate in football matters
01 March 2006
Article by Heiner Busch who is the editor of Bürgerrechte & Polizei/CILIP and member of the "Komitee für Grundrechte und Demokratie", which is one of the founding organisations of the European Civil Liberties Network. This article first appeared in CILIP 83 (1/2006).
More data, more comprehensive situation reports, controlled borders and restriction of movement: police forces in EU member states are expanding their cooperation with all of the enthusiasm of a football supporter.
At the end of August 2004, a few weeks after the European championship, Portugal presented its report on Euro 2004 to the EU Council's Police Working Party (1). Around 1.2 million people had followed the games in the stadiums and 600,000 people had travelled to Portugal from abroad for the competition. There were few incidents with the police arresting only 261 people (of whom 99 were British and 26 German) during the four week operation; they collected the personal data of around 100 more. Complaints mainly concerned the sale of tickets on the black market and public order offences. It was largely uneventful due to the Portuguese police force's successful strategy, which practised restraint; the police said that while there were many plainclothes officers on the ground the riot police were kept in the background.
In the Police Working Party, the Portuguese delegation explicitly praised the cooperation with its foreign partners. It said that the information provided prior to and during Euro 2004 had ensured that violent fans could not travel to the games. All of the participating countries had sent police delegations to Portugal, but the biggest one came from the UK, with 22 police officers; Germany sent 18, France, the Netherlands and Spain sent 11. Liaison officers, stationed in a specially created control centre, ensured coordination; plainclothes officers familiar with the football scene, so-called "spotters", advised the police on-site in the cities where the games took place and in the stadiums. They helped their Portuguese colleagues assess the supporters and if necessary they identified familiar faces or arbitrated conflicts arising among their national fans. They therefore carried out a typical mix of coercive and preventative tasks.
This is how the German police would like the World Cup to be this year. Police delegations are expected from all the countries whose teams have qualified for the finals. The British delegation, with 44 officers, will probably be one of the biggest, if not the largest (2). According to the German government around 550 foreign police officers will be deployed in Germany during the games. The Federal Police Force (the former Bundesgrenzschutz) will be supported by 318 foreign colleagues (3). At the beginning of 2005, the interior ministers conference expected an additional 220 foreign police officers to be deployed within the remits of regional police forces. Their food and lodging will be paid for by German taxpayers, costing around 1.6 million euros. Before the "spotters" swarm to the locations where their teams are playing and their fans could create problems, the German police's Central Sports Information Point (ZIS) will provide communications technology, so they can stay in contact with each other and liaise with the German operations control centre. This time, officers from the UK, but presumably also from other states, will not only put rioting fans under observation, but they will also be given powers of arrest (5). This development represents a qualitative shift in European police cooperation in football matters.
An intricate system
It began in the 1980s - at a time when police cooperation within the then EC was taking place in the informal structures of the TREVI network. In 1987, one year before the German European championship, the TREVI Working Group 2 began setting up the correspondents' network, through which German officers started communicating in the form of a q