Evaluation of Turkey's understanding of combating organized crime through the relations of the Directorate for Combating Smuggling and Organized Crime and Europol: 2005-2020

Today, organized crimes are no longer country-specific crimes, but have become a concern for many countries at the same time through international networks. Organized crimes, which are described as transnational crimes, include many various crimes, those who commit the crime follow technology very closely and all kinds of technical developments can be used to commit crimes. International networks developed by criminal organizations make a country's struggle alone insufficient and require close cooperation between countries. The fact that Interpol, which provides cooperation between countries all over the world, is inadequate in certain areas has prompted the European Union to establish a regional police organization. In this sense, Europol is an organization to which EU member and candidate states are members and which organizes broad cooperation between members. Turkey became a member of Europol during the EU candidacy process and has been maintaining close cooperation since 2005. Turkey accepted organized crime as a special field of struggle and fought against it with a special unit, with the establishment of the Smuggling Department in 1981 and the transformation of this unit into the Smuggling and Organized Crime (KOM) Department in 1995. The aim of this thesis is to discuss the effectiveness of Europol cooperation in Turkey's fight against organized crime. An evaluation will be made on what strategic innovations Turkey has made in the fight against organized crime after becoming a member of Europol and the results of this.