Police arrested a trafficker in Belgrade this week. They accuse him of smuggling more than 600 people along the Balkan route. The case shows just how well EU police cooperation already works. The law meant to punish networks like his is a different story: Brussels tried to update it in 2023, and still has not finished.
German and Serbian authorities arrested the suspect on 5 August, with Eurojust and Europol coordinating the operation. He allegedly ran a smuggling network that funnelled Syrian nationals into the EU from Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Drivers then took them onward through central Europe by car, van and lorry, until they reached Germany.
The network charged between €2k and €10k per person. Police already arrested five other members in Germany, the Netherlands and Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2025. A joint investigation team at Eurojust made this week’s arrest possible. It let German and Serbian investigators share evidence and plan the action together, exactly the kind of cross-border tool the EU has spent years building.
Rules stuck since 2002
The rules used to prosecute this case still date back to 2002. The so-called Facilitators’ Package, a directive and a framework decision passed that year, set the EU’s basic definition of migrant smuggling. Brussels has not substantially updated it since, even as smuggling networks have grown more sophisticated and spread across more borders.
The Commission tried to fix that in November 2023. It proposed a new directive with tougher penalties: up to three years in prison for a basic offence, rising to ten years if a migrant dies as a result. Companies involved in smuggling could face fines of up to €40m, or a share of their global turnover.
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The Council agreed its negotiating position in December 2024. The Parliament’s lead committee, LIBE, followed in March 2025 under rapporteur Birgit Sippel (S&D/DEU). Since then, the file has gone quiet. As of the latest update to Parliament’s own tracker, the proposal remains simply “tabled”, and neither side has confirmed a deal.
That leaves cases like the Belgrade arrest resting on two-decade-old law. The Commission itself admits the current rules struggle to keep pace with how networks now operate.
Fight over saving lives
One question is holding everything up. What happens to the people who help migrants for reasons that have nothing to do with money?
Aid workers, volunteers and family members can still fall foul of the current rules. The Commission’s new draft does not guarantee that will change.
In 2025, the question landed squarely on the EU’s top court. The case that reached it put a face on exactly what a missing humanitarian exemption can mean for an ordinary family.
A test case from Bologna
A Congolese woman arrived at Bologna airport with her eight-year-old daughter and thirteen-year-old niece. Both girls travelled on false passports. She had fled threats to her family’s life back home. She had taken over the niece’s care after the girl’s mother died.
Italian prosecutors charged her with facilitating illegal entry. The Court of Justice of the EU disagreed. In June 2025, it ruled that a genuine caregiver crossing a border with children in her care commits no crime.
Aid workers and volunteers still have no such guarantee. In December 2025, four UN special rapporteurs issued a warning. Without a clear, binding exemption for humanitarian acts, they said, the EU risks punishing exactly the people the Bologna ruling tried to protect.
Human rights defenders and civil society are increasingly subjected to criminal prosecution.
— Mary Lawlor, UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights Defenders
Ms Lawlor and her fellow rapporteurs did not mince words. Human rights defenders and civil society, they said, “are increasingly subjected to criminal prosecution” for work that used to be uncontroversial. Until the EU’s co-legislators settle that argument, the revised rules will likely stay parked. Police forces will keep making cases like Belgrade’s, or Bologna’s, under a law written before smartphones existed.
