Can't smugglers just walk straight through E.U. customs checks?

Question

I am just curious why everybody coming into the U.S. must fill out a customs declaration, while in the E.U. you make your declaration by walking either through "Nothing to declare" or "Things to declare" (and sometimes there is a separate lane for intra-E.U. travelers).

It seems like it would be much easier to get away with smuggling things into the E.U. than into the U.S. as often at the E.U. I never see anyone there. On the contrary, in the U.S., I've been pulled over a few times for a random inspection. In the E.U., how do they catch someone if there is no one there?

Edit: I should also note: How do you know what to declare when you are not given a form? Not everyone has access to the Internet (although that is becoming less and less of a problem).

Answer 1

Random inspections do happen. Their frequency depends on the ratio of customs officers to passengers at that time of day and on other factors.

There are also x-ray checks of some or all of the checked luggage. When the inspector finds something "potentially interesting," they make a note of where that suitcase goes. If the person carrying the suitcase goes into the "nothing to declare" gate, the odds of a spot check go up.

There is no difference between walking through a "nothing to declare" gate and filling a form, in both cases the passenger makes the declaration that there are no taxable items.

Answer 2

The EU states tend to be small with a great deal of international travel between them. All except Malta and Cyprus have open road borders with other EU states making hard enforcement between states rather pointless (and indeed legally dubious). Searching everyone at the airport would be a very lengthy process requiring a lot of resources.

Also, the law for transporting goods between EU states is different from the law for transporting goods from outside the EU. For example, if I go to France, I can buy as much wine as I can personally drink and bring it back to the UK without paying any duty. But if I go to Argentina and buy wine there, I can only bring in a mere four litres before I have to declare it and pay excise duty (customs tax) on the whole lot.

However, there has never been any move to centralise customs at first entry to the EU (probably because then your destination country would become important, as different EU states can have slightly different customs formalities for importing non-EU goods). Therefore a flight from London to Paris may have UK-made, internal EU goods on board mixed with transfer luggage from an American family.

Now why the EU states do not bother to methodically search people on arriving: it is really up to the member states on how they wish to distribute their resources. The Scandinavian countries do tend to have customs officers waiting when you enter their customs area. However, the UK thinks it is a waste of money to ask people when you could just search their bags before they are delivered to the carousel and arrest the culprits before they leave the airport.

Answer 3

how do they catch someone if there is no one there?

Well, the simple answer is that if nobody is there, they don't catch anyone there. The aim is to do enough random inspections, that relatively few people will take on the risk of smuggling and so the problem is somewhat managed. X percent occupancy deters more than X percent of potential smugglers, up to a point, and 100% occupancy certainly doesn't deter 100% of smugglers. I don't think any EU country claims that its target is to catch all drugs, or all untaxed products. I mean, they wouldn't turn it down if you offered it, but it's not possible. They just aim to stop it getting ridiculous. OK, so you've never been stopped at EU customs, but if you're not confident you never will be then it's job done.

There are at least a couple of failure modes for this. One is that if you want to enforce bio-controls then you pretty much have to search everyone, because (if my second-hand information about Australian customs is anything to go by) a fairly high proportion of travellers seem to be idiots who bring their illegal lunch into the country without seriously considering the risk. There's no deterring idiots. So staffing customs X percent of the time only stops X percent of that illegal stuff coming into the country, which probably isn't enough if X is low.

The other is that organised drug (or other) smugglers will do their best to take advantage of your procedures: either by guessing when customs will be unattended or by using large numbers of mules who are coerced or otherwise have little to lose. Catching these people is a matter of combining random checks, good old-fashioned detective work, and playing the averages with staffing customs in places which genuinely are entry points for smuggling. Drug sniffer dogs seem to do a reasonably good job for way less money than physically searching everybody as they pass customs, and can be applied to luggage out of sight, as well as occasionally patrolling passenger areas.

It's not necessarily the case that the most effective way to spend a given budget, is on staffing more customs points. Especially for intra-Schengen border crossings, where the whole point of Schengen is supposed to be to save effort and admin on the part of both customs/immigration and travellers, by throwing one big barrier around the whole lot. Yes, the barrier is somewhat leaky, but as with borders elsewhere in the world (for example US-Mexico) the important question is how much you want to spend on making it somewhat less leaky. It'll never be airtight so it's up to politicians and administrators to define "good enough".

Answer 4

I've flown through the next INTL airports on "domestic(EU)" flights and on international flights :

• Barcelona - El prat T1
• Barcelona - El prat T2
• Madrid - Barajas T2
• Madrid - Barajas T4
• London - Luton (unkwnown terminal)
• London - HTRW T3
• London - HTRW T5
• London - HTRW T4
• Brussels Zaventem (unkown terminal)

And so far my experience has been that EU as a whole doesn't really care about what individuals take in/out as long as it's legal*.

*legal : no knifes, no drugs, no big filled bottles, no live animals, etc...

Why?

Completely personal opinion, i'm no lawyer, but from my POV, the human and technological cost of stopping James Notfakename from bringing a pork sandwitch into europe or an ipad from hong kong is way too high to even care, the effects on the economy will be completely unnoticeable if that horrible sandwitch sneaks security, and even if you managed to disguise something like a toad, the EU has so many varying ecosystems in the 28 member states that yet another invasor animal won't hurt, also the ecosystem here is stronger than in some very complicated places like australia, where leaving two rabbits alone can lead to rabbitgeddon. the TSA thinks otherwise though and threw my EU regulated, air-sealed, purchased on the duty-free zone, pack of deer butcheries.

waves fist on air angrily...

how do they catch someone if there is no one there?

People must pass X-rays, cameras, bioscanners and dogs.

of course, sneaking a small bag of pot from a local airport to another can be easy, but as soon as you reach some INTL airport chances are they already know even your underwear size once you cross the gates.

How do you know what to declare when you are not given a form?

There are big, multi-language walls on the airports telling you what you should declare, what items are banned , and what needs special sealing to get in.

EU law also works differently than in USA; not knowing a law/regulation doesn't mean you don't have to follow it.

Example : We've got no miranda rights statement here, everybody should know their rights and duties beforehand.

Answer 5

Customs officials in Britain favour intelligence-led searches, rather than random searches. That is, they will look for patterns in the flight data, x-ray/dog-search particular bags, observe behaviour on CCTV, and then stop selected people. I think this is the approach in the rest of the EU.

I can't find a better write-up than one in the Daily Mail: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-2014741/Nothing-declare-To-catch-smuggler-On-frontline-customs-officers-Gatwick-Airport.html

"If we get a positive the bag goes back on the belt and is watched in the baggage hall before the passenger is pulled as they walk through the customs channel."

Answer 6

I cross the border between UK and France twice a week and I've never seen anyone declaring anything or even beeing randomly checked.

Sometimes there is an officer on the UK side behind a desk, but never saw him pulling someone.

I've been to other EU countries as well and I've never been checked except in Andorra (which is not technically an EU country if I remember correctly).