TOn 4 November 2019, the heads of the Customs and Border Guard Services of Lithuania and Belarus signed the protocol approving the Contingency Co-operation procedure of the Customs and Border Guard Services of the Republic of Lithuania and the Republic of Belarus. Contingency measures foreseen in the Procedure are designed based on the CELBET2 Inter-agency and 3rd Country Co-operation Team’s recommendations and the best practices of other EU Member States.
Procedure was signed in order to ensure the uninterrupted flow of vehicles and to increase the throughput capacity of road border control points at the Lithuanian-Belarusian border. This document provides for coordinated actions by the Customs and Border Guard Services of the two neighbouring countries in contingency situations at the local, regional and central level.
The Procedure has been prepared and coordinated with the partners in the framework of the Co-operation Development Project “Administrative Capacity Building and Introduction of International Standards at the State Customs Committee of the Republic of Belarus”, funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Lithuania in 2019: in order to share best regional practices and learn new ways of efficient collaboration, international conference “Contingency planning: increase of response capacity for Border and Customs control” has been organised in Silene BCP (Latvia) with kind assistance of Latvian customs and border guard services.
Similar arrangements exist at the Latvian-Belarusian, Polish-Belarusian, Estonian-Russian borders
Contingency measures foreseen in the Procedure are also following the Guidelines on Further Development of the Cooperation between Border Guards and Customs ((2018)6193959-03/12/2018) of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Taxation and Customs Union and the Directorate-General for Migration and Home Affairs.
