From December 5 till 8, 2022, the Border Management Programme in Central Asia (BOMCA 10) held a national training of trainers (ToT, basic level) on document security in Ashgabat.

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

The training session has been completed by the instructors of the institutes and training centres responsible for training professionals in the area of documents checks of persons crossing the border, as well as border control and customs officers with respective experience.

The expertise during the workshop was delivered by the Chief of the Examination Service of the State Border Guard of Latvia.

In the framework of ToT, experts provided basic and advanced training curricula 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 the 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.

This ToT is implemented under the framework of the Component 1 “Institutional Development of Border Control Agencies”, under which similar ToTs have been completed earlier for Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Thus, this activity closes a series of workshops on this topic in the region.