Call: Border crossing points topic 1: Novel mobility concepts for land border security

The primary aims of the Secure Societies Challenge are:

• to enhance the resilience of our society against natural and man-made disasters, ranging from the development of new crisis management tools to communication interoperability, and to develop novel solutions for the protection of critical infrastructure;
• to fight crime and terrorism ranging from new forensic tools to protection against explosives;
• to improve border security, ranging from improved maritime border protection to supply chain security and to support the Union's external security policies including through conflict prevention and peace building;
• and to provide enhanced cyber-security, ranging from secure information sharing to new assurance models

On the one hand this call targets the development of technologies and capabilities which are required to enhance systems, equipment, tools, processes, and methods for rapid identification to improve border security. This includes both control and surveillance issues, exploiting the full potential of EUROSUR and promoting an enhanced use of new technology for border checks, also in relation to the SMART BORDERS legislative initiative. It also addresses supply chain security in the context of the EU’s customs policy. On the other hand this call focuses on new technologies, capabilities and solutions which are required to support the Union's external security policies in civilian tasks, ranging from civil protection to humanitarian relief, border management or peace-keeping and post-crisis stabilisation, including conflict prevention, peace-building and mediation. This will require research on conflict resolution and restoration of peace and justice, early identification of factors leading to conflict and on the impact of restorative justice processes.

This call is divided in the following parts:

• Maritime Border Security
• Border Crossing Points
• Supply Chain Security
• Information Management in the context of External Security
• Conflict Prevention and Peace Building
• Ethical/Societal Dimension

Border authorities are facing new challenges to secure land borders of the EU/Schengen areas, while the recent trends show a significant increase of travellers’ flows. In the meantime, travellers are requiring fast and convenient border crossing, therefore pushing authorities to implement novel approaches in order to maintain and even improve the throughput at the crossing points.

Infrastructure for land border checks is not very flexible. As a consequence, improved solutions are required. They could rely on the development of mobility concepts along with traveller programmes that are extensively being developed in order to facilitate border crossing. Moreover, the current wide-spread use of mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets provide potentially exploitable means that could (or could not) be combined with border authorities dedicated mobile equipment to perform identity checking for border security.

A general challenge is to make the technical equipment affordable enough to be widely employed.

Link to the National Contact Point Finder.