Europol and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested 17 people Wednesday in their first joint operation against child sexual exploitation. The arrests were the result of a yearlong operation dubbed “Atlantic” that identified a total of 37 offenders and 8 victims of child sexual molestation and the production of illegal content.

A Europol news release said that the search for more victims continues.

The operation began in November 2010 when representatives of the FBI and the Europol met in the Hague, the Netherlands, at an operational meeting. In December 2010, the FBI shared the results of their investigation into international pedophile networks with authorities in Italy, France, Spain, UK and the Netherlands.

The European Union (EU) announced it has added the names of 21 Belarusian officials to its blacklists, citing a recent surge in repression in the former Soviet country.

The EU said it froze those individuals assets and banned them from traveling to the 27 member countries because they were “responsible for the crackdown on civil society,” according to a statement issued yesterday.

The 21 names are in addition to 200 Belarusian persons and companies already blacklisted, which includes three companies linked to President Alexander Lukashenko, who Western human rights groups call “Europe's last dictator.”

The EU also has an arms embargo on Belarus and exports of “material for internal repression” are also banned.

Kyrgyzstan's Prime Minister Omurbek Babanov announced Monday that he had fired every custom official, border guard, and police officer in his country's two international airports.

Babanov made the decision in order to “curb corruption at the airports,” according to the government’s press service.

All employees at the airports in the country's capital Bishkek and the southern city of Osh are to be fired in within 10 days, per his executive order.

Moreover, Babanov announced that any replacement employees would be fired within one month of employment if evidence of corruption persists.

Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Human Rights Rapporteur Coskun Coruz called for the prosecution of Russian officials involved in the death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, the termination of the posthumous trial against him, and an end to the intimidation of his family.

“As a member of the OSCE, Russia should fulfill its human rights obligations and adhere to the norms and values of the OSCE,” said Corkuz in a statement Monday. “In the harrowing death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, Russia's lawlessness is absolutely not fitting into OSCE’s values. What is particularly shocking is the unprecedented prosecution of a dead man,” he continued.
Coruz’s statement was a response to an appeal from Ludmila Alexeeva, chair of the Moscow Helsinki Group, for the OSCE to urge its member state to stop the trial against Magnitsky.

Official anti-corruption bodies in Macedonia are not doing enough to combat corruption, which is costing citizens up to €1 billion in bribes, says a non-governmental anti-corruption organization.

More work needs to be done to combat a culture of bribery, the NGO, Transparency Macedonia, said in a report released last week.

“The findings of the State Statistical Office show that Macedonians each year pay about a billion Euro in bribes sought from them,” said the watchdog’s executive director, Ana Janevska-Deleva.

Spanish National Police, in co-operation with Europol, Tuesday arrested four persons claiming to be part of the Anonymous hacker collective.

The arrests are a result of Operation Thunder, an investigation that began in June into a group police believe hacked into Spanish government websites and databases.

The four men are “responsible for a number of DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attacks, web defacements and publication on the internet of Spanish police officers personal information,” according to a news release. One of the men arrested, known as “Thunder” is believed to be responsibly for administering the secure communication networks used by Anonymous. 

The servers were hosted in the Czech Republic and Bulgaria, but they were controlled remotely from Spain. According to Europol, the ‘hacktivist’ operatives also have links to South American hackers, which are being investigation by the Spanish police and Interpol in conjunction with the Europol Cyber Crime Centre.

Russian Federal Prosecutors have accused a subsidiary of Rosatom, the country’s state-owned nuclear energy corporation, of corruption and knowingly selling inferior equipment manufactured for nuclear reactors.

An investigation by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), has concluded that the procurement director of ZiO-Poldolsk machine building plant purchased low quality raw materials and kept the remaining money for himself, reports the Bellona Foundation, an international environmental NGO based in Norway.

The FSB made the investigation public last week when they arrested the company’s procurement director, Sergei Shutov.  The investigation into ZiO-Poldolsk began in December.

The company is the only manufacturer of steam generators for Rosatom’s nuclear plants in Russia and for use by its international reactor subsidiary Atomstroyproekt.

The U.S. Treasury Department Friday sanctioned seven people it identified as “key members and associates” of the Brothers’ Circle organized crime network and an entire faction of Japan’s Yakuza gang, including the two men who lead it.

The government froze all U.S. assets of the identified persons and have prohibited U.S. persons from doing business with them.

“Today's action casts a spotlight on key members of criminal organizations that have engaged in a wide range of serious crimes across the globe,” said David S. Cohen, Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, in a news release.

The Brothers’ Circle is a multi-ethnic criminal group composed of several Eurasian criminal groups largely based in countries of the former Soviet Union.  It allegedly operates in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.

Ioan Clamparu, 42, an alleged Romanian human trafficker known as “Pigs’ Head,” was sentenced to 30 years in prison by a court in Madrid, Spain, on Tuesday. Clamparu was one of the 450 fugitives targeted by the Interpol’s operation “Infra-Red,” aimed at locating and arresting international fugitives charged with serious crimes such as murder, child abuse, human trafficking, and money laundering.

According to the Interpol’s arrest warrant (PDF), Clamparu was accused of leading a human trafficking network which forced more than 100 Romanian women into prostitution in Spain between 2000 and 2004. The Romanian women and underage girls were lured with promises of legitimate jobs, such as cleaning and waitressing. Clamparu and his associates paid for the women’s travel expenses, presenting their help as a loan that the victims would pay back from their wages once they started their new “jobs.” Upon their arrival to Spain, the victims were forced into prostitution.

Russia has joined the Anti-Bribery Convention of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) at a ceremony at OECD headquarters in Paris on Friday. At the ceremony, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Denisov handed the ratification documentation to Angel Gurria, the OECD Secretary General. By joining the convention, Russia has agreed to regular reviews of its implementation of anti-corruption laws.

Within 60 days of the accession ceremony, Russia will officially become the 39^th party to the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials.

“Accession will harmonize our legal system with international standards in the fight against corruption” Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said last week.