Introduction to Part II: Sources and Literature

Despite the fact that the problem of organised crime in the last ten years has moved steadily higher on the political agenda of the European Union and the Council of Europe and many of their Member States, there is no comprehensive and regularly updated overview of the nature, extent and development of this problem in Europe. Anyone wishing to study this problem in depth consequently faces a stern task. Firstly, interested scholars, practitioners and, even more so, common citizens encounter the problem of having to look for the available sources at various levels and in various places, and find at the end of this search that many aspects of organised crime in Europe are not discussed in the sources or are not discussed adequately and that, for example for linguistic reasons, possibly highly relevant sources will remain inaccessible to them. Secondly, they face the difficulty that widely differing sources are involved in terms of both form and content, and that it is therefore hardly possible to put together a properly substantiated and wideranging general picture of the organised crime situation in Europe on the basis of the existing sources.