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On 5 March the Executive Director Ilkka Laitinen of Frontex officially opened the European Mid-Level Course at the Federal Police Academy in Lübeck, Germany.

As FRONTEX is a European coordinator of operational border security cooperation, training is one of our very important tasks”. Mr Laitinen explained. “The basic principle of our training activities is related to development of common training standards to reach comparability of national training systems, as well as compatibility of human and technical assets. The fact that training tools are developed jointly in co-operation with experts from the Member States and that they are also implemented by Member States´ experts within national training systems substantially contributes to the harmonization of the level and effectiveness of the management of the EU external border,” he continued.

The Federal Police Academy is one of the academies certified for implementation of the first EU mid level course. This training tool was developed by Frontex together with an international working group with participants from 8 Member States.

The basic aim of the European Mid-Level Course is to give junior supervisory staff not only in-depth knowledge of command, control and operational structures of other border guard services but also an opportunity to optimize their expertise on border guard cooperation and to view border control as a common European task. The course will concentrate on teaching basic border guard tactics, procedures, and operational structures in the respective states rounded out with practical training modules at the external borders. English will be the seminar language and, as another advanced training objective, will constitute the essential common language of the all European border guard services.

In the first four-week course, the three female participants and twelve male participants from 15 different EU Member States will spend one week each at border police academies and border police offices in Germany, Lithuania, Hungary and Slovenia.