New Member States to become final destination for drugs and prostitution?

The upcoming enlargement has fuelled fears about Central and Eastern European mafias spreading organised crime across the enlarged EU. While these concerns might be justified, especially when it comes to human trafficking and music piracy, many experts argue that fears of an explosion of organised crime sparked off by enlargement are exaggerated.

"People have this vision of criminals sitting in their Mercedes waiting for the borders to open on May 1 in order to drive west," a police official said to the Financial Times. "The truth is that crime rarely waits for borders to open and that the real division of Europe's criminal market between western and eastern criminals took place shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain."

However, there is a serious danger of organised time flourishing in the new countries themselves, as enlargement brings prosperity through foreign investment and EU funding. Particularly, experts warn that drug consumption might be on the rise, transforming the new Member States from mere transit regions into lucrative end-user-markets. A recent report by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) showed that drug consumption in these countries is indeed already increasing, but it also pointed out that enlargement offered countries a unique opportunity to benefit from closer collaboration (see

A similar switch from transit to final destination country could occur in the are of human trafficking, in particular concerning prostitutes coming from places such as Romania, Ukraine and Moldova. Instead of being sent on to the Western states, increasing wealth in the new Member States might lead to victims reaching their final destination as soon as Hungary or Poland. Although the EU has anticipated this problem by the funding programme for candidate countries ahead of enlargement and close police co-operation, the security of the new 4,000 km long Eastern border is expected to cause major problems.