were ranked lower than the country indicated. Kosovo (Serbia) and Albania fell lower in the ranking than the average in sub-Saharan Africa, and all scored less than the average for East Europe or the OECD countries.
It has even been suggested that crime may play a role in regional instability, and continued instability certainly increases vulnerability to organised crime. The World Bank ratings rank four countries in South East Europe as less stable than the average for sub-Saharan Africa:
Serbia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Albania. All of these areas have been affected by the dispute over the fi nal status of the international protectorate of Kosovo. Fundraising surrounding the Kosovo confl ict has involved traffi cking of various commodities in the past, and the lines be-tween the political and the criminal remain substantially blurred in some areas. In the end, it is impossible to demonstrate statistically a correlation between the pres-ence of organised crime and instability because neither issue can be satisfactorily quantifi ed. But there appears to be good reason to treat organised crime as a stability threat in parts of South East Europe, due to the role it has played in past confl icts.
Conclusion
This report argues that the crime situation in South East Europe is getting better. Low murder rates are dimin-ishing further still. All indications are that rates of other forms of conventional crime – such as robbery, burglary, assault, and car theft – are lower than in West Europe.
This should come as no surprise, as the region does not
exibit many of the social and economic points of vul-nerability experienced in high crime areas around the world.
More remarkably, there appears to have been a reduc-tion in various forms of organised crime that emerged during the years of transition and confl ict. Heroin traf-fi cking by ethnic Albanians – the single most notorious Balkan crime phenomenon – has apparently diminished in its scale, based on an analysis of statistics provided by West European law enforcement agencies. Human traffi cking seems to have seen its peak in the 1990s – the numbers of victims detected in West Europe indicate a greatly reduced fl ow from previous estimates. Migrant smuggling too has diminished as Bulgarian and Roma-nians citizens no longer need visas to enter the EU, and effective policy responses have reduced fl ows of illegal migrants from outside the region. Interventions and a declining market also appear to have taken the momen-tum out of the traffi cking of fi rearms and cigarettes.
While these are all positive trends, signifi cant challeng-es remain. The threat of regional instability remains and criminal groups could play a role in future confl ict. The region continues to be the premier transit zone for heroin destined for Western Europe and an important corridor for human traffi cking and smuggling of migrants. Grow-ing access to West Europe through the expansion of the Schengen area and the introduction of more liberal visa regimes could fuel both traffi cking and emigration, feed-ing the marginalized diaspora networks on which much of transnational organized crime is based. Dealing with these transnational threats requires strengthening gov-Real GDP growth rate in 2005
Source: UNECE, Eurostat 1.6
4.1 4.3
5
5.6 5.6
6.2
7.1 7.2
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
EU 15 Romania Croatia Bosnia & Herzegovina Albania Bulgaria Serbia Moldova FYR Macedonia
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ernance and institutions within South East Europe.
In particular, it is important to provide more international assistance to strengthen the rule of law. Within the overall efforts to build and institutionalise the rule of law, particu-lar emphasis should be placed on crime prevention and criminal justice. This means building capacity and trust in public institutions, in particular the courts and the police.
Enhanced trust in law enforcement mechanisms should manifest itself in growing confi dence in the legal system in general, resulting in increased use of the banks, in-vestment instruments, and legal contracts. These posi-tive trends will gain a momentum of their own over time.
Kosovo provides a good example of the way that strengthening the rule of law can retard the growth of crime. Murder rates have declined signifi cantly in recent years. It was the chaos accompanying the war and eco-nomic collapse that led to the growth of ethnic Albanian organised crime groups, and growing order appears to be undermining their competitiveness. Organised crime thrives in areas where people have little investment in their societies, and people do not invest where their fu-ture prospects are uncertain. The more that social and political conditions normalise, the more that criminal groups will lose their grip on Kosovo.
This report argues that the rise of organised crime in the Balkans was a direct result of past instability, but that the situation seems to be changing for the better.
As the region stabilizes and the rule of law is secured, the incentives and opportunities for criminality should further fade.
World Bank Rule of Law rankings in 2006
Source: World Bank 0
10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
Kosovo (Serbia) Albania SS Africa average Serbia Bosnia & Herzegovina Montenegro FYR Macedonia Bulgaria Romania Croatia East Europe average OECD average
percentile rank
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Introduction
As part of its mandate to monitor drugs and crime situ-ations around the world, the UNODC has been taking a closer look at the available statistical information in regions where transnational crime is an issue. In this re-port, the focus turns to Europe, in particular to the region which has been referred to over time as “the Balkans”
and more recently as “South East Europe”. These terms are used interchangeably in this report to refer to the member partners of the Stability Pact for South East-ern Europe: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia (including Kosovo).1
This report is based on desk research, making use of the proprietary databases which the UNODC maintains:
the Survey of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems (CTS), the Annual Reports Question-naire (ARQ), and the Individual Drug Seizures database (IDS). This information was combined with statistical data gathered from other sources, as well as historical and analytical materials. For more on the methodology of the report, see Annex 2.
The report opens with a look at the social and economic indicators for the Balkans in order to assess certain risk factors that have been identifi ed in studies of high crime situations around the world. Next, the standardised crime data from the CTS are discussed, with particular reference to the most reliable of crime indicators, the homicide rates. The discussion proceeds to organised crime, starting with an examination of its historical ori gins and moving on to a sector-by-sector exploration of the data in each major crime market. Finally, the report looks at some of the ways these crime issues could be affecting social, economic, and political progress in the region.
This simple undertaking does not aspire to comprehen-sive coverage of the crime and justice issues in all nine nations concerned. Rather, it focuses on interrogating the data on the severity of the crime problem in South East Europe, and possible trends in these data.
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