How EMPACT works
EMPACT runs in four-year cycles. Every cycle follows the same four steps: assess the threat, choose the priorities, act, evaluate. Then it starts again — smarter than last time.
The four-year cycle at a glance
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Step 1
Understand the threat
Europol produces the EU Serious and Organised Crime Threat Assessment.
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Step 2
Choose the priorities
EU countries agree a short list of crime priorities and common goals.
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Step 3
Act
Shared two-year plans turn into more than 200 operations a year.
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Step 4
Evaluate
An independent evaluation feeds directly into the next cycle.
Step 1 — Understand the threat
Every four years, Europol asks a simple question: what is organised crime in Europe actually doing?
The answer is the EU Serious and Organised Crime Threat Assessment, usually shortened to EU-SOCTA. It is built from intelligence supplied by every Member State, EU agencies, non-EU partners and private companies, and it is the most complete picture of organised crime in Europe that exists.
It does not just describe today. It looks at where criminal networks are heading — new markets, new technologies, new methods.
The 2025 assessment, which shapes the current cycle, found three things happening at once:
- Organised crime is destabilising. It no longer just makes money quietly. It spreads violence and corruption, and it reaches into legitimate business and public institutions.
- It has moved online. Digital infrastructure is now where much of it lives — recruitment, sales, laundering, communication.
- It is accelerating. Artificial intelligence and other new technologies are making criminal operations faster, cheaper and harder to detect.
“Threat assessment” is the intelligence world’s term for a diagnosis. Before deciding on treatment, find out what’s actually wrong.
Step 2 — Choose the priorities
A threat assessment lists everything. A priority list forces a choice.
Working from the assessment, EU countries and the European Commission narrow it down. The discussion happens in a Council body known as COSI — the committee where Member States coordinate on internal security — and the outcome is formally adopted by the Council of the EU.
The result is a short list of EU crime priorities: the threats that Europe will concentrate its shared effort on for the next four years. For 2026–2029, there are seven.
At the same time, a set of common goals is agreed that apply to every priority at once. These are the things that must happen no matter which crime you are fighting: following and confiscating criminal money, building skills and training, working with countries outside the EU, using new technology well, and preventing crime rather than only punishing it.
Step 3 — Act
This is where a priority becomes an operation.
For each priority, experts from the participating countries and agencies sit down together and write a shared plan covering two years. In EMPACT language this is an “operational action plan”; in practice it is a to-do list agreed by everyone who will have to do it.
Each plan breaks down into individual operational actions, each one led by a named country. An action might be a coordinated series of raids, a joint investigation into a specific network, a Europe-wide inspection campaign, a training programme, a prevention initiative, or work with a non-EU country on a trafficking route.
Across all the plans, more than 200 operations are carried out every year.
Some of the biggest are Joint Action Days — short, intense, tightly coordinated periods where dozens of countries act simultaneously across Europe, with a live coordination centre keeping everyone in step.
“Operational action plan” (OAP) — the shared two-year plan for one crime priority. There are 13 of them in the current cycle. You will see the abbreviation “OAP” in official documents; it means nothing more than “the plan”.
Step 4 — Evaluate
At the end of every cycle, someone independent asks whether it worked.
An external evaluation examines what EMPACT actually achieved, what got in the way and what should change. It is not a formality: the most recent evaluation concluded that EMPACT delivers substantial added value, and identified real problems — funding constraints and uneven commitment among them — that the next cycle was explicitly designed to address.
The findings go to the Council, which uses them to shape the cycle that follows. That is what makes EMPACT a cycle rather than a series: each round is built on an honest account of the last one.
The rhythm, at a glance
| Every four years | Threat assessment, new priorities, independent evaluation |
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| Every two years | New action plans written for each priority |
| Every year | More than 200 operations; results published |
| Continuously | Operations, Joint Action Days, training, prevention |