MASIF: Monitoring and coordination project, and its treaty basis

What it addresses

Every other dossier in this index describes a programme that does something operational — a joint unit in a seaport, a task force at an airport, a tracing database, a prosecutorial network. MASIF is the exception, and the reason it exists is the reason the others are hard to run together. A family of projects funded from one budget but implemented by different lead agencies, in different regions, against different commodities, will duplicate effort where their mandates overlap and leave gaps at the seams between them. Neither problem is visible from inside any single project, because each one is reporting against its own results framework. MASIF is the function that looks across all of them at once.

How it works

The work is monitoring and coordination rather than delivery, and European Commission programming documents describe its role as coordinating actions across these initiatives and identifying synergies between them. In practice that means two distinct kinds of coherence. Internal coherence is the fit between the projects themselves: whether an airport task force in a given country is connected to the port unit in the same country, whether a tracing capability built under one project is reachable by the investigators trained under another. External coherence is the fit with everything outside the programme — other donors, national plans, and the regional bodies already working on the same corridor. A monitoring component produces recommendations and visibility rather than seizures, which makes it the hardest part of such a programme to evaluate and the first to be cut.

Where it applies

MASIF is not tied to a geographic corridor. It is shared infrastructure, available to any participating jurisdiction, and its usefulness in a given place depends on what that jurisdiction contributes to it rather than on where it sits. The obligations that determine that are set out on the firearms page.

For a record system the relevant map is therefore not a route but a ratification. A jurisdiction bound by the Firearms Protocol has undertaken to mark weapons at manufacture and import and to keep the records for at least ten years; one that is not has no such obligation, and a weapon passing through it can lose its history legitimately. Of the 106 jurisdictions covered on this site, 83 are parties and 23 are not.

Not parties to the Firearms Protocol — 23

Afghanistan · Belize · Botswana · Cameroon · Chad · Colombia · Djibouti · Egypt · Equatorial Guinea · Eritrea · Gambia · Georgia · Guinea · Kosovo · Kyrgyzstan · Namibia · Niger · Pakistan · Saint Lucia · Suriname · Tajikistan · Uzbekistan · Zimbabwe

That list is the practical limit on what a shared tracing system can reconstruct. The system itself is neutral about it: it will return whatever was entered, and where no obligation to enter anything exists, an accurate query returns nothing and the absence looks identical to a clean history.

Treaty basis

In substance the work operationalises no instrument obliges a donor to coordinate its own programming; the relevance to the conventions is indirect, in that the capacity these projects build is capacity to exercise powers a state already holds under the instruments it has ratified. 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

Sources

• European Commission, Service for Foreign Policy Instruments — Monitoring and coordination project . Checked 2026-07-30.

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