Dacic talks with US Justice Department representatives

Belgrade/Washington, Feb 03, 2010 (Serbia Today) - – Serbian First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior Ivica Dacic met with representatives of the US Department of Justice to discuss security and police cooperation, on the third day of his visit to the US.

After talks, Dacic said that at the meeting he spoke with US Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division Lanny Breuer and Deputy Assistant Attorney General Bruce Swartz. The US Justice Department is one of the most valuable partners of the Serbian Interior Ministry due to the differences in the political systems of the two countries and because the FBI and other security services are part of it. The Interior Ministry cooperates with the Justice Department on a large number of activities, such as the International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program and the witness protection program, said Dacic. He said that cooperation to date has been extremely good and that there are many areas in which cooperation needs to be progressed, adding that a number of capacity building programs are being carried out in the Interior Ministry and the police force and there is huge potential for other joint projects.
One of the future projects is joint assessment of threats posed by organized crime and terrorism in our region, said Dacic.

He said that talks with the US Justice Department will be continued over the next couple of days and meetings will be held with the Director of the FBI and representatives of other agencies, as well as the US Department of Homeland Security. Dacic said that the US Justice Department officials found their cooperation with the Serbian Interior Ministry to be beneficial. The Justice Department has assessed that their cooperation with the Serbian interior and justice ministries is excellent. Major progress was made recently regarding the fight against organized crime, corruption and drug trafficking; several important arrests were made in connection with drug trafficking and large quantities of narcotics were confiscated, said Dacic. Dacic said that Serbia’s progress concerning the implementation of the law on the confiscation of illegally obtained assets was also assessed positively and accordingly it was agreed that cooperation should be continued with the US Marshals Service, which provides witness protection and deals with the confiscation of illegally obtained assets in the US. The assessment by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that Serbia had done a great deal in the previous year to combat human trafficking was also conveyed, said Dacic.