By Bosphorus News Geopolitics Desk
Türkiye is pushing for the Organization of Turkic States (OTS) to establish a Crime Fighting Council before moving to a broader regional law-enforcement cooperation agency known as TURKPOL.
Interior Minister Mustafa Çiftçi said the proposal to establish the council entered the joint declaration adopted at the third meeting of OTS interior ministers in Astana, Kazakhstan. The council would focus on organized crime, terrorism, narcotics, irregular migration, illegal betting and gambling.
Çiftçi said Türkiye aims to have the council's founding agreement signed at the next OTS leaders' summit in Ankara. The organization's official calendar lists the summit for Oct. 30.
Once the council is operating, Türkiye plans to continue work on TURKPOL, which Çiftçi described as a law-enforcement cooperation agency for Turkic states.
The proposal was first outlined publicly during the Astana meeting on Thursday. Çiftçi said the council could create a common mechanism for identifying wanted persons and later develop into a structure comparable to Europol and ASEANAPOL.
TURKPOL itself has not yet been established. Çiftçi's sequence puts the Crime Fighting Council first, followed by negotiations on the wider agency.
The ministers also discussed allowing citizens of Turkic states to travel using national identity cards and establishing common passport-control points at airports, according to Çiftçi. No implementation timetable or technical arrangement for those proposals was announced.
The Astana meeting brought together interior ministers from Türkiye, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. The talks covered cross-border organized crime, cybercrime, terrorism, drug trafficking, wanted suspects, irregular migration and migrant smuggling.
Sources: Mustafa Çiftçi, Organization of Turkic States, DHA, Bosphorus News review and reporting.