Max-Planck-Institut für ausländisches und internationales Strafrecht

Organised Crime in Europe

Patterns and Policies in the European Union and Beyond

The project “Organised Crime in Europe” constitutes the first attempt systematically to compare organised crime concepts, as well as historical and contemporary patterns and control policies in thirteen European countries. Among these there are seven “established” Member States of the European Union (Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom), two “new” Eastern European members (the Czech Republic and Poland), a candidate country (Turkey), and three non-EU countries (Albania, Russia and Switzerland). Writing on the basis of a standardised research protocol, thirty-three experts from different legal and social disciplines provided insight through detailed country reports. On this basis, Cyrille Fijnaut and Letizia Paoli, the two principal investigators, compared organised crime patterns and policies in Europe and assessed EU initiatives against organised crime. The book resulting from the project was published in 2004 by Springer.