CEPOL - European Police College

06/09/2021 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 06/09/2021 09:58

CEPOL HoOPS participates at Medicrime Convention Online Conference

The CEPOL Head of Operations, Ms Mailis Pukonen, represented CEPOL today at the online Conference: 'The MEDICRIME Convention - An international instrument to fight counterfeiting pharmaceutical crime in times of COVID-19 pandemic'. The conference was organised by the Council of Europe for high-ranking representatives of police services and other law-enforcement authorities to discuss the role of the MEDICRIME Convention in the investigation of offences and how it fills the gaps in the criminal law with the aim of protecting public health.

Speaking this morning as a panellist at the session entitled: Need to better train the members of the investigating teams in terms of counterfeiting of medical products and similar crimes, Ms Pukonen presented the training products offered by the agency on pharmaceutical crime, under the umbrella of Intellectual Property Crime training activities.

'Cross-agency collaboration in this area is crucial for success. CEPOL has a long-standing cooperation with the European Union Intellectual Property Office - EUIPO, to offer a variety of training opportunities to law enforcement officials covering the good investigative practices of falsification of medicines and general trademark protection', noted the CEPOL Head of Operations.

The relevant CEPOL training portfolio has three pillars:

Virtual Training Centre on Intellectual Property Rights, a joint electronic learning platform with EUIPO available on LEEd, CEPOL's learning management system for Law Enforcement officials.
The annually held joint CEPOL-EUIPO onsite course 'Intellectual Property Rights - Counterfeiting and Piracy'.
Webinars, also under the umbrella of IPR.

CEPOL also offers on its LEEd platform recorded webinars on pharmacrime: Counterfeit medicines, Sports nutrition and counterfeit dietary supplements, Counterfeit and sub-standard goods during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to the above, in CEPOL's training portfolio other non-specialised products are also relevant for falsified medicines (e.g. series of training material on IP enforcement databases).