CAIRO – 22 September 2017: Egypt launches a new regional initiative to establish two African anti-narcotics centers based in the Anti-Narcotics and Crime sector in Egypt at the end of the 27th conference of the Heads of National Drug Law Enforcement Agencies (HONLEA) on Friday. 

The five-day conference, held from September 18-22 in Hurghada, Egypt, was hosted by the Interior Ministry under the auspices of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Interpol organizations, World Customs and ECOWAS, along with the participation of 20 African countries. 

During the meeting, the Egypt’s Anti-Narcotics General Administration’s (ANGA) deputy presented the Interior Ministry’s initiative to establish two African centers to exchange information on international smuggling rings in coordination with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. 

The first center’s mandate is for North African countries to counter smuggling across the Mediterranean Sea and deserts across “Egypt- Libya- Algeria-Tunisia-Morocco-Sudan-Chad-Niger-Mali-Mauritania-Western Sahara”, while the other is for “Egypt-Sudan-South Sudan- Eritrea-Djibouti-Somalia-Kenya-Tanzania-Central Africa”. The centers shall serve as an international anti-narcotics agency by air and land, and will reflect HONLEA’s distinctive cooperation. 

By setting up such centers, Egypt aims to collect and evaluate information to determine the best operating means for counter-narcotics, as well as reinforce the exchange of information among the member states in order to help them take the necessary actions to identify perpetrators. It also seeks to strengthen the anti-narcotics’ leadership’s role to harmonize the information exchange systems within a legal and regulatory framework, analyze all information about drug related problems, make appropriate recommendations and coordinate among the member states to upgrade human competence by organizing relevant training courses at specialized training institutes of the Egyptian Interior Ministry.