Eduardo González
The Council of Ministers has referred to the Cortes Generales (Spanish Parliament) the Cooperation Agreement between Spain and Angola on security and the fight against crime, while authorizing the expression of Spain’s consent to be bound by said agreement.
The agreement was signed in Madrid on November 5, 2018 by the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, and his then Angolan counterpart, Anhelo de Barros Veiga Tavares. The text annuls the previous bilateral cooperation agreement on the same matter, dated June 1997, and will allow the renewal of the legal framework for collaboration that has already existed since 1987.
The agreement, as reported by the Council of Ministers last Tuesday, responds to the concern of both countries about the scope of criminal phenomena and the challenges posed to security by human trafficking, terrorism, drug trafficking and new demonstrations. of transnational organized crime.
Among its provisions, those relating to the fight against organized crime stand out, with specific reference to terrorism, cybersecurity, trafficking in human beings and crimes against the environment, as well as operational and investigative collaboration against different criminal modalities.
The bilateral agreement joins the agreements previously signed by Spain with forty countries, including a dozen African States (Mauritania, Senegal, Morocco, Tunisia, Cape Verde, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Mali and Niger), and Its objective, as reported at the time by the Ministry of the Interior, is to strengthen collaboration between both countries on issues such as advice, training or the exchange of information. The agreement provides for the constitution of a mixed commission and is also open to other areas, such as penitentiary institutions.
According to the Ministry of the Interior, police cooperation between Spain and Angola has been considerably intense since the early 1990s and has mainly taken the form of training and advisory activities.
