EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The Annual Report of the Secretary General on Police-Related Activities in 2012, submitted in accordance with Decision 9, paragraph 6, of the 2001 Bucharest Ministerial Council Meeting, provides an overview of the police-related programmes and projects, implemented by the OSCE executive structures, including the thematic units in the Secretariat, the Institutions and the field operations, during 2012. General Overview of Police-related Activities The topics that continued to dominate OSCE’s policing agenda were the fight against transnational threats, including those, emanating from organized crime and terrorism, and the promotion of the principles of democratic policing. With a total number of some 920 activities, 2012 witnessed a slight decrease in the absolute number of activities compared to 2011. 1 The types of OSCE assistance to participating States varied from country to country and among the executive structures. Since the OSCE does neither have the mandate nor the means for conducting operational policing activities, the focus of police assistance was directed at three areas of support: legislative and strategic support; support in training and capacity building, and the facilitation of study tours and conference participation of host State representatives abroad. Among these three areas of police-related assistance, by far most efforts were devoted to training and capacity building, with around four fifths of all activities focusing on this field of assistance. This constitutes a notable increase from 2011, when around two thirds of the activities were related to training and capacity building. The increase in training and capacity building came along with a decrease of legislative and strategic support activities. The reason for this was that many host States of field operations had finalized the drafting of various police reform strategy documents and action plans in 2011 and early 2012, which were due to be adopted in 2012 and 2013 by the host States’ legislatures. Therefore, legislative and strategic support activities were only slightly more frequently implemented than activities to facilitate study tours and conference participation of national stakeholders (eleven and eight per cent, respectively). While more than three fifths of all police-related activities were devoted to addressing general police development and reform, 2012 still witnessed a slight increase of anti-organized crime activities. In the field of general police development and reform, activities devoted to enhancing and consolidating community policing/police-public partnership projects were still most common (almost one third of all activities), particularly in South-Eastern Europe, and certain States of Central Asia and the South Caucasus. However, partly due to projects being completed or project implementation responsibility being handed over to national authorities, the number of community policing activities declined considerably compared to the previous year. Support in strategic planning of police reform, the development of national police training capacity as well as measures for enhancing police accountability were the other three areas receiving most attention by the executive structures upon request from their host States. Police-media relations, border and customs activities, domestic violence and public order management also received notable attention. 2 1 2 10 The number of 920 does not mean that 920 different events were conducted in 2012. The number means that events which were co-organized and/or attended by two or more executive structures, or by representatives of host States whose participation had been facilitated by the executive structures -, were all counted as single activities of these structures, as all of them devoted time, personnel and financial resources to these activities. A graphic overview of the types of assistance provided by the various executive structures in the different fields of police development and reform is given in Appendix 4 to this report.