Improving the Border Agency Cooperation
Among the OIC Member States for Facilitating Trade
97
 All CEFTA parties must have a national border agency MoU on cooperation signed to
ensure data exchange between them.
 Border inspection agencies may transfer the responsibilities of conducting inspections
to other border inspection agencies (preferably to Customs) to carry them out on their
behalf.
 Issued documents and certificates and inspections performed by the border inspection
agencies of one CEFTA party shall be automatically recognized and accepted by the
other CEFTA party without performing additional, national controls of documents and
goods. The precondition of this unilateral and mutual recognition of border inspection
certificates and controls is full harmonization of national legislation of the CEFTA party
in question with the relevant EU acquis and compliance of inspections (conducting
controls, methodology, testing, etc.) with the one in the EU.
Apart of the stipulated area of national and regional cooperation of border agencies in CEFTA,
there are subparagraphs in the Protocol that regulate some technicalities related to the
working hours, possibility to ask for the inspection to be performed outside business hours of
border inspection agencies and so forth. Protocol 5 is expected to be adopted in November
2016 and ready to be implemented towards the end of the following year.171 To pave the way
for international cooperation, a national agreement on BAC is expected to be signed by
September 2016. This agreement should include customs authorities, food safety authorities,
state inspectorates, national agencies for information society, and other administrations.172
Twinning project with the EU
The Twinning project, funded by the EU through the Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance
(IPA) is a vehicle for institutional cooperation that aims to provide support for the
transposition, implementation and enforcement of the EU legislation (EU acquis). The
beneficiary countries of IPA include Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia,
Kosovo, Montenegro, Serbia and Turkey. Twinning develops the capacities of the public
administrations of the beneficiary states throughout the accession process in order to bring
about positive developments in the region. It strives to share EU good practices with
beneficiary public administrations and to foster long-term relationships between
administrations of existing and future EU countries.173
IPA 2012 program is essentially a customs modernization initiative and as all Twinning
projects it must yield “mandatory results” that are prerequisites for EU accession. It aims at
supporting the Albania to reach certain objectives in customs transit procedure with special
focus on legislation, procedures, systems and anti-fraud. The project purpose is aligning
customs transit legislation and procedures with the EU acquis, also with regard to the
interoperability of IT systems with the EU – NCTS system. This Twinning project has two main
components: 1) Customs legislation and procedures related to interoperability of IT systems
with the EU-NCTS System 174; and 2) Enforcement and intelligence of customs transit.
The main expected outcomes of Component 1 of the project are as follows:
171 CEFTA expert interview, 2016
172 Ministry of Economy expert interview, 2016
17 accessed 15 June 2016).
174 The NCTS (New Computerised Transit Systems) is a system that enables traders to submit Common transit declarations
electronically and allows customs administrations to exchange messages containing relevant information for managing the
entire life cycle of transit operations.