UNODC convenes Western Balkans workshops on detecting firearms in postal parcels
In back-to-back workshops in Belgrade and Tirana, UNODC brought customs authorities, postal operators and express courier companies from all six Western Balkans jurisdictions together with Ukrainian experts to increase their shared response to firearms trafficking through postal channels. Under Project Hermes, UNODC convened a workshop on public-private partnership and operational responses to security risks in postal traffic, gathering the customs administrations, designated postal operators and express courier companies from Sarajevo, Podgorica and Belgrade.
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On 25 June, a mirror meeting in Tirana brought the same agenda to counterparts from Tirana, Pristina and Skopje. Both sessions were joined by the State Customs Service of Ukraine and the National Regulatory Authority for Postal Services of Ukraine.
The scale of the threat is well documented. Under one operation in the Western Balkans, a single perpetrator was found to have shipped more than 600 parcels internationally containing firearms parts, underlining how ordinary postal and courier channels can be exploited at volume.
Countering that abuse depends on actors who rarely sit at the same table, from customs officers and postal sorting staff to private courier operators. Each workshop opened with a Ukrainian overview of threats and challenges in postal traffic, including seizures, the pressures on postal operators under wartime conditions, emerging trafficking methods and the lessons transferable to Western Balkans jurisdictions.
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Participants then moved into a structured exchange of information for the period January to June 2026, in which customs administrations, postal operators and courier companies each presented their detections, the methods behind them, the commodities involved and the geographic patterns of origin, transit and destination, including sender and recipient anomalies. A closing session addressed training, equipment and maintenance needs, with UNODC outlining courses currently under development and participants identifying gaps and priorities.
The two meetings strengthened operational cooperation across the region, built a clearer shared picture of trafficking trends in postal and courier channels, and exposed Western Balkans practitioners to Ukrainian detection practice. Participants also agreed to sustain the dialogue, with further periodic sub-regional information-exchange meetings foreseen for the second half of 2026, alongside continued UNODC support for training and effective use of detection equipment.
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