Programme dossier
Led by UNODC, with INTERPOL and the World Customs Organization.
AIRCOP: Airport Communication Project, and the obligations behind it
Joint airport interdiction task forces connected to international police and customs databases in real time.
What it addresses
AIRCOP covers the passenger and air-cargo route rather than the sea lane. Airports concentrate a very large number of short-duration opportunities to intervene, and the operational problem is not detection capacity but the few minutes available between identifying a passenger or consignment and its departure.
How it works
The programme establishes joint task forces at participating international airports, staffed across customs, police and border agencies, and gives them direct access to international databases so that a check can be run inside the time a transfer allows. Its distinctive feature is communication between airports on the same route: an alert raised at departure is actionable at arrival.
Where it applies
AIRCOP addresses 3 of the corridors described on the drug routes page: The West African corridor, The Caribbean corridor, The southern route. The jurisdictions on each are listed there, and every one of them has a record setting out its treaty position, its confirmed national instruments and its current monitoring status.
That combination is what determines whether a programme of this kind can operate in a given place. Capacity-building assumes there is a legal power to build capacity around: an interdiction technique needs a statutory basis, a joint investigation needs a mutual legal assistance route, and a trace needs a record-keeping obligation. Where those are absent the constraint is legislative rather than operational.
Jurisdictions on those corridors — 29
Anguilla · Antigua and Barbuda · Barbados · Brazil · British Virgin Islands · Cabo Verde · Colombia · Dominica · Dominican Republic · Gambia · Ghana · Guinea · Guinea Bissau · Jamaica · Kenya · Liberia · Mauritius · Mozambique · Nigeria · Pakistan · Saint Lucia · Saint Vincent and the Grenadines · Senegal · Seychelles · Sierra Leone · Somalia · Tanzania · Trinidad and Tobago · Venezuela
This is the reach of the corridors AIRCOP addresses, not a list of participating states: participation is asserted by the inherited index and confirmed by no official source, so it is not published. What can be stated is which jurisdictions sit on the routes in question, and what the record shows about each. Of the 29, 3 carry no national instrument confirmed against a citable register — Liberia, Mozambique, Somalia — which is precisely the condition in which operational assistance runs ahead of the legal basis for using it.
An airport cell is a place where separate services sit at one table, so what the records on these 29 jurisdictions name matters to it: 9 name both a customs and a police body in this dataset, 18 name a customs body, and 2 name none at all. Those are published directories, not staffing. The other asymmetry on the same reach is legal: 5 of the 29 are not party to the Firearms Protocol, so a weapon detected in transit meets a different set of obligations depending on which leg it is found at.
Treaty basis
In substance the work operationalises the law enforcement cooperation provisions of the 1988 Convention and UNTOC. The distinction matters: a programme of this kind creates no legal powers of its own. It builds the capacity of states to use powers they already hold under instruments they have ratified, which is why a jurisdiction that is not party to the relevant instrument gains less from participation than one that is. What each instrument obliges is set out on the conventions reference.
Questions
What was AIRCOP?
Airport Communication Project, led by UNODC, with INTERPOL and the World Customs Organization. Joint airport interdiction task forces connected to international police and customs databases in real time. The description on this page is drawn from UNODC, which documents it.
What problem was AIRCOP designed to address?
AIRCOP covers the passenger and air-cargo route rather than the sea lane. Airports concentrate a very large number of short-duration opportunities to intervene, and the operational problem is not detection capacity but the few minutes available between identifying a passenger or consignment and its departure.
Which trafficking corridors does AIRCOP relate to?
The West African corridor, The Caribbean corridor, The southern route. Those corridors and the jurisdictions on them are set out on the drug routes page.
What is the treaty basis for this kind of work?
In substance, the law enforcement cooperation provisions of the 1988 Convention and UNTOC. A programme of this kind does not create legal powers; it builds the capacity to use powers a state already has under instruments it has ratified, which is why the ratification position on each jurisdiction record matters to what such a programme can achieve there.
Is AIRCOP still running?
This index does not assert a current operational state for any programme in it. Funding cycles turn over faster than the pages describing them, and a dossier that claimed a programme was active would be making a claim it could not keep current. UNODC is the place to check, and it is linked from the sources at the foot of this page.
Where does AIRCOP apply?
To the 29 jurisdictions on the corridors it addresses, each of which has a record here. 3 of them carry no national instrument confirmed against an official register, which is where capacity-building meets a documentation gap: a joint unit can be established in a jurisdiction whose statute this dataset cannot cite. Participant lists are not published here — the inherited archive asserts them and no official source confirms them, so the reach given is the corridor reach.
Sources
- UNODC — Airport Communication Project . Checked 2026-07-30.