From October 11 to 14, the Border Management Programme in Central Asia BOMCA 10, in partnership with the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (FRONTEX), and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) held a national training of trainers (ToT) on document security (basic level).

The training session aimed at enhancing the capacity of trainers and instructors with the expertise in authenticity verification for documents and advancing their skills in the detection of forged documents.

The training session was completed by the instructors of the institutes and training centres responsible for training professionals in the area of documents’ checking of persons crossing the border, as well as border control and customs officers with respective experience in this field.

The expertise during the training was delivered by the Chief of the Examination Service of the State Border Guard of Latvia and an expert from FRONTEX.

In the framework of ToT, experts provided training curricula for the basic level of document security, developed on the basis of the European Union’s best practices and a set of materials for further training of staff in the field. At the end of a four-day workshop, a regional expert network was established to facilitate information exchange in the area of document security. In future, participants of the advanced ToT course will be trained to prepare Fraudulent Travel Document Warnings (alerts) to be disseminated through the national points of contact.

Similar workshops were organized in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.