UK Home Secretary Yvette Cooper met Iraqi Interior Minister Abdul Amir Shimmari [Getty]
The UK government said Thursday it had struck a “world-first security agreement” and other cooperation deals with Iraq to target people-smuggling gangs and strengthen its border security.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said the pacts sent “a clear signal to the criminal smuggling gangs that we are determined to work across the globe to go after them”.
They follow a visit this week by Cooper to Iraq and its autonomous Kurdistan region, when she met federal and regional government officials.
“Organised criminals operate across borders, so law enforcement needs to operate across borders too,” she said in a statement.
Cooper noted people-smuggling gangs’ operations “stretch back through Northern France, Germany, across Europe, to the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and beyond”.
“The increasingly global nature of organised immigration crime means that even countries that are thousands of miles apart must work more closely together,” she added.
The pacts include a joint UK-Iraq “statement on border security” committing both countries to work more closely in tackling people smuggling and border security.
The two countries signed another statement on migration to speed up the returns of people who have no right to be in the UK and help reintegration programmes to support returnees.
As part of the agreements, London will also provide up to £300,000 (US$380,000) for Iraqi law enforcement training in border security.
It will be focused on countering organised immigration crime and narcotics, and increasing the capacity and capability of Iraq’s border enforcement.
The UK has pledged another £200,000 to support projects in the Kurdistan region, “which will enhance capabilities concerning irregular migration and border security, including a new taskforce”.
Other measures within the agreements include a communications campaign “to counter the misinformation and myths that people-smugglers post online”.
Cooper’s interior ministry said collectively they were “the biggest operational package to tackle serious organised crime and people smuggling between the two countries ever”.
