Ex-post evaluation of the "Prevention and fight against crime" 2007-2013 Programme (ISEC) and the "Prevention, preparedness and consequence management of terrorism and other security related risks" 2007-2013 Programme (CIPS) : final report; Part 1: Evaluation results on ISEC

The objective of this evaluation was to assess the relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, coherence and EU added value of the 'Prevention and fight against crime' (ISEC) Programme between the period 2007 and 2013. It was found that ISEC has proven to be relevant to stakeholders due to its wide scope and response to an important need for transnational cooperation in the area of prevention and fight against crime. The relevance of operating and monopoly grants was deemed to be rather unsuccessful and thus abandoned respectively during the second half of the programming period and its successor Programme ISF. Overall in terms of ISEC's effectiveness, it can be concluded that it largely achieved its general and specific objectives and numerous project examples of results are available to demonstrate this. Albeit slightly lower than would have been desirable, funding absorption can be considered to have been satisfactory overall and increasing towards the end of the programming period. Compared to the first half of the programming period, it was concluded that the Commission had the ability and flexibility to identify and learn from previous shortcomings and to respond efficiently to these with adjustments to the design, access to and/or implementation of the Programme.