Programme dossier
Led by European Union.
EU-ACT: EU Action against Drugs and Organised Crime on the record
Route-based cooperation on drug policy and enforcement, spanning the heroin corridors as well as the cocaine ones.
What it addresses
EU-ACT is organised around routes rather than around a single technique or commodity, which distinguishes it from the port, airport and aviation programmes. Its premise is that the states along a corridor face a shared problem in sequence, and that assistance delivered to one of them in isolation is displaced rather than effective.
How it works
The programme combines operational cooperation with drug policy work, including the demand and health side that pure enforcement programmes exclude. Its geographic span reaches the Central Asian and Balkan legs of the opiate corridors as well as the Atlantic cocaine routes.
Where it applies
EU-ACT addresses 3 of the corridors described on the drug routes page: The Balkan route, The northern route, The West African corridor. 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 — 25
Afghanistan · Albania · Bosnia and Herzegovina · Brazil · Cabo Verde · Colombia · Gambia · Ghana · Guinea · Guinea Bissau · Kazakhstan · Kyrgyzstan · Liberia · Montenegro · Nigeria · North Macedonia · Pakistan · Senegal · Serbia · Sierra Leone · Tajikistan · Türkiye · Turkmenistan · Uzbekistan · Venezuela
This is the reach of the corridors EU-ACT 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 25, 3 carry no national instrument confirmed against a citable register — Kyrgyzstan, Liberia, Turkmenistan — which is precisely the condition in which operational assistance runs ahead of the legal basis for using it.
The three corridors this dossier is read against reach 25 jurisdictions here, and they are the least uniform set of any corridor programme on this index: 17 are party to all four instruments and 8 are outside the Firearms Protocol. A route-based programme has to work with that unevenness rather than around it — the same operational request travels through legs that have taken on different obligations, and the leg with the fewest is where a chain of custody or a mutual legal assistance request has the least to rest on.
Treaty basis
In substance the work operationalises the 1988 Convention in full, including its demand-reduction provisions, alongside 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 EU-ACT?
EU Action against Drugs and Organised Crime, led by European Union. Route-based cooperation on drug policy and enforcement, spanning the heroin corridors as well as the cocaine ones. The description on this page is drawn from European Commission, which documents it.
What problem was EU-ACT designed to address?
EU-ACT is organised around routes rather than around a single technique or commodity, which distinguishes it from the port, airport and aviation programmes. Its premise is that the states along a corridor face a shared problem in sequence, and that assistance delivered to one of them in isolation is displaced rather than effective.
Which trafficking corridors does EU-ACT relate to?
The Balkan route, The northern route, The West African corridor. 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 1988 Convention in full, including its demand-reduction provisions, alongside 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 EU-ACT 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. European Commission is the place to check, and it is linked from the sources at the foot of this page.
Where does EU-ACT apply?
To the 25 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
- European Commission — EU Action against Drugs and Organised Crime . Checked 2026-07-30.