Organised crime outlook Sweden

The project was financed by the 2004 AGIS programme of the European Commission and led by professor Tom Vander Beken at the Institute for International Research on Criminal Policy (IRCP) of Ghent University in Belgium. It had the objective of developing a risk-based methodology for the analysis of the long-term threat from organised crime. There has since a few years back been an agreement around the need for introducing such a risk-based methodology in the situational reports on organised crime that each EU Member State is obliged to send to Europol annually. These reports have up until now been largely descriptive, and it has thus been difficult to extract the implications for the development of criminal policy in the EU. The expectation is that the methodology that has been proposed in this project will contribute to a more proactive and strategic focus in the situational reports on organised crime in the future.

One part of the project Organised Crime Outlook was to test the risk-based methodology that had been developed by IRCP, in four case studies. This was done at two different levels: three studies were performed at Member State level (in Sweden, Belgium and Slovenia), and one at the European Union level. The present publication constitutes the case study performed in Sweden, thus called Organised Crime Outlook Sweden. A more detailed background and description of the methodology as well as a presentation of all four case studies has been published in a report by IRCP (European organised crime scenarios for 2015, Maklu: 2006).