Home Affairs Ministers of G-4 agree on Seville Declaration to strengthen cooperation mechanisms

During this international meeting, the Home Affairs Ministers of the G-4 reviewed various issues relating to the fight against Jihadi terrorism, organised crime, drug trafficking and migratory flows.

The Minister for Home Affairs, Juan Ignacio Zoido, stressed the importance and singular nature of the G-4, "a useful and unique forum of this type that our predecessors agreed to set up in the summer of 2012, the first meeting of which took place in Rabat on 25 January 2013".

Juan Ignacio Zoido recalled during the joint press conference that the signing of the Rabat Declaration "laid the foundations for a forum with an operational vocation, the main aim of which was to ensure that our Home Affairs Ministries acted on a joint basis, with the same speed and degree of trust as on a bilateral basis". Subsequently, other ministerial meetings of the G-4 have been held, specifically, in Paris on 20 February 2014 and in Lisbon on 28 April 2015. In this regard, Juan Ignacio Zoido made clear that "these meetings decisively help to bed down this vitally important forum for improving our cooperation at a home affairs level".

The Spanish Minister for Home Affairs underlined that over these last four years since 2013, various working sub-groups have been set up in each area of cooperation of the G-4 with the aim of identifying those actions that are necessary for improving cooperation and developing the measures included in the Rabat Declaration.

Juan Ignacio Zoido listed some examples of the results of this work achieved by the G-4 in its first few year of operation, such as:

• The conversion of the Police Cooperation Centre in Algeciras, a Spanish-Moroccan initiative, which incorporates a French and a Portuguese liaison officer
• Cooperation in the fight against drug trafficking, within the framework of the Telos Plan, in which French, Moroccan and Portuguese liaison officers have participated

Juan Ignacio Zoido asserted to his G-4 partners that "today in Seville, we have taken one more step in the joint work within the framework of the G-4 by agreeing on the Seville Declaration, which includes an Action Plan that will serve to implement specific initiatives of an operational nature, meetings of experts and the strengthening of the cooperation mechanisms contained therein".

Juan Ignacio Zoido explained, at this G-4 Summit, that "we have set up a Steering Committee that will supervise and evaluate the degree of implementation of this future Action Plan, which will be a measure that decisively consolidates our cooperation in the G-4 and which provides greater activity to this group".

Lastly, Juan Ignacio Zoido pointed out that, despite the G-4 being relatively new, a "valuable common heritage" has been forged of cooperation and initiatives in areas of great importance such as the fight against terrorism, drug trafficking and unlawful immigration, incentivising the exchange of experiences and police training.

In this regard, Juan Ignacio Zoido underlined that the G-4 Summit held in Seville "has allowed our law enforcement agencies to further step up their collaboration, strengthening and intensifying cooperation in the fight against terrorism, organised crime and drug trafficking, and allowing them to work together in jointly managing migratory flows based on shared responsibility".