DW.World.De Headline; says: 'The McCann case has raised new calls for a Europe-wide response procedure in the case of abducted children. While the European Commission is already trying to increase cooperation in cross-border investigations, there are currently no plans to standardize the response in the case of a missing child."We have been told that there are no plans at the moment for an EU-wide alert system," said Carolyn Bouchard from independent child protection agency SafeHands. "The level of police cooperation is slowly improving and most current systems work well on a national level, but we continue to push for an efficient network across the continent."Delphine Moralis, the acting secretary general for the European Federation for Missing and Sexually Exploited Children, was more specific. "Based on the experience of its members (21 non-governmental organizations in 14 EU countries) when dealing with missing children cases across the EU, Missing Children Europe advocates the need to develop alert support systems for cases of child abductions or life threatening disappearances of children in countries where no system exists," she said. "We also recommend the development of co-ordination procedures and interconnection schemes between existing systems, such as the ones in Belgium, France, Germany, Greece and the UK."
The closest thing Europe currently has to a standardized response is the AMBER Alert, a procedure imported from the United States, although not all countries in the EU use it.
Amber alerts are issued by police when four main criteria of a child abduction case are satisfied: when a child under 16 goes missing; when the child is believed kidnapped, when a senior police officer fears that death or serious harm may come about, and when the case has sufficient descriptive details, such as photographs of the child or suspected abductor.The alerts are then broadcast to the public via radio and television stations, immediately interrupting scheduled broadcasting to report the missing child. The alerts are also shown on electronic motorway signs and sent to email accounts, mobile phones and wireless devices of registered search volunteers."A coordinated AMBER Alert system in Europe would be hugely beneficial because one of the most critical parts of an abduction investigation is informing the public," said Robert Hoever, from the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). "It would require each country to have a designated AMBER facilitator and for all the facilitators to meet and plan together a memorandum of understanding as to how they would work together."
