§ 54. Mr. RathboneTo ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department if he will make a statement on the present extent of information exchange between the United Kingdom and other members of the European Community in order to combat most effectively trafficking in illegal drugs.
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§ Mr. MellorOfficers of the police and Customs services regularly exchange information about individual cases with their counterparts in other Community countries. In addition, the national drugs intelligence unit exchanges such information with other national units where these exist. These exchanges have proved highly effective and we should like to build on them. We therefore welcome the endorsement by the Dublin European Council of the United Kingdom proposal to speed up work on the establishment of a European central drugs intelligence unit.
These are regular exchanges about operational aspects of the fight against illicit drug trafficking within the framework of the Trevi and Customs mutual legal assistance groups. More generally, the recently formed European committee to combat drugs and the Council of Europe's Pompidou group have shown themselves to be useful fora for sharing national information about the problem and for the development of new measures designed to strengthen European co-operation against such trafficking.