The NCO-meeting of 2024 was held outside Münich on the 22. of september. During this meeting a joint statement was made about the "cocain-tsunami" flowing over Europe during the last couple of years.
The subject of the statement has been adressed several times. A similar statement was made in Iceland in 2023 and this years statement brings it further.
4-3-2-1 strategy
In this statement The Nordic Customs Organization call for action from the Nordic Governments to increase their effort to improve the everyday safety in our countries following these four steps (the inversed 4-3-2-1 strategy):
The main objective is to increase the security and safety of our citizens by increased and improved border control.
Politically the national governments must
Agree on a lasting increase in funding of the Customs authorities – a long-term financial plan
The legal basis must be explored and modernised to increase interdepartmental and international cooperation
Measures that each Customs authority must implement are:
Increase the number of operational staff
Equip the units with more and modern control-equipment and IT-tools
Modernise and implement new legislation for more efficient border control and cooperation
The effects of this measures will be:
Reduced accessibility of goods and services that makes the wanted criminal profit
Reduced possibility to move criminal profit in/out of the countries
Reduced access to the means and tools the criminals use to conduct their crimes
Increased collecting, processing and sharing of information on flow of goods and persons connected to organized crime, with the intent to improve own and other authorities in their efforts to work more efficient and goal oriented.
New name, new website and updated statutes
The website www.nordiccustoms.org was officially opended. This is a simple page which is ment to contain basic information about what the NCO are and how to get in contact with the six different national unions. This is the first time that the NCO has a "place called home" in the digital space, and now it`s possible for polticians and journalists to make a search on the net and actually get a hit on that the NCO really exists. NCO will also publish their political statements and short reports from their biannually meetings and conventions.
You will also reach the same website if you use then national domain-servers:
As you may have noted in this article the abbriviation NCO is used. During this meeting there was an agreement of two name changes for the Nordic organization. To keep it short and coherent with the website, the international name is now Nordic Customs Union, NCO for short. In the native nordic languages the abbreviation NTO is kept but the full name is now Nordisk Told Organisation (danish spelling). The NTO agreed that it`s was way overdue to change the name into a genderfree designation. Historically the name of the organization has varied some what, and it has been a little different in the native languages over the years - but as of today there is a common designation only made different by the spelling in each country.
In addition to the new name of the NCO, there were an agreement that there should be a short description under the name. A working group by NT and DTS will come up with some suggestions for such a description in a later NCO video-meeting.
As a direct consequence of the name changes and also the fact that the alternation of the NTO-convention has changed to be every other year, with a NTO-meeting attatched to the UFE-meeting in the year in between, a new set of statutes had to be written. The responsibility to host the meeting and the convention is also shifted from the president to the hosting union.
The NTO also made a decision to only have the official statutes written in english from now on. Each national union may translate them if they like, but the original will be in english and not bilingual (danish/english) as earlier.
You can download and read the new statutes for NTO/NCO here:
Other issues
There was also more interresting items om the agenda for this meeting. All the unions presented their national reports, and then there were discussions about the upcoming congress in the UFE an how NCO should approach this meeting. There was a mutual agreement that NCO should make a joint inaugural speech (read the speech here) and also attempt to make UFE use the joint NCO-statement (see above) as a statement of their own.
There were also discussions about influencing the nordic customs agencies to increase their cooperations regarding purchase of expensive equipment, technological development, special education and serviceagreements. The NCO decided to establish a working committee with participants with a professional background to brainstorm and produce a letter of inspiration that will be sent to all the nordic customs agencies
Further on there were some experiences shared from the norwegian conference about "everyday preperedness" and a healthy discussion about the development of employees in the Customs.
You can download the agenda here (danish only):
The attending unions at this meeting were:
Dansk Told & Skatteforbund (DK)
Norsk Tollerforbund (NO)
TULL/KUST (SE)
TVML (FI) and
TFI (IS).
The finnish union TL was unable to attend, and the norwegian tax officers union, Skatteetatens Landsforbund - SKL - attended as guest during the UFE-part of the meeting, since they also rejoined and attended the following UFE-congress.
Comments