A meeting took place on the morning of Monday 21 October 2013 between the WCO Secretary General, Mr. Kunio Mikuriya, and the Director-General of the European Union (EU) Joint Research Centre (JRC), Mr. Dominique Ristori, to discuss possibilities of collaboration between the WCO and the JRC on common themes such as container monitoring, risk analysis and the fight against counterfeiting.
Several items for potential collaboration were discussed around these themes. One topic of particular interest among the JRC’s Customs-related activities was the Container Traffic Monitoring and Risk Analysis Programme on container movements into and out of the EU. The WCO presented its activities in relation to intellectual property rights (IPR) and public health and safety, along with a briefing on interception operations and the Interface Public-Members (IPM), the WCO’s anti-counterfeiting tool. A more technically focused meeting will be convened in the coming months.