The Slovenian Police and the Ministry of the Interior are organising an international conference for police and other experts on missing persons, in particular missing children and elderly persons. The conference will be held under the auspices of the European Police Expert Network on Missing Persons (PEN-MP), which is associated with the Council of the European Union's Law Enforcement Working Party (LEWP), and organised in cooperation with the AMBER –Amber Alert Europe foundation. The conference, which will address this highly complex area of policing is to take place in Ljubljana on 18 and 19 October 2022.

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The conference, which will begin with opening addresses by the Minister of the Interior Tatjana Bobnar, the President of PEN-MP and Head of the Homicide and Sexual Offences Section of the Slovenian Police, Damjan Miklič, and Frank Hoen, Founder and Chairman of AMBER Alert Europe, will feature presentations by renowned speakers, providing an opportunity to reflect on and evaluate past work and explore current and future courses of action in dealing with missing persons. They will address various operational and other aspects of the search for missing persons, while the long-term goal in this field remains achieving a common European approach to dealing with missing persons, especially missing children.

In addition to police experts from 25 European countries, Australia, Canada and the USA, the conference will bring together representatives of Interpol, Europol, Frontex, the EU Council's LEWP party, the Bavarian police, and representatives of the Ljubljana, Zagreb and Lower Saxony (Germany) Police Academies.

Also present will be representatives of the Supreme State Prosecutor’s Office of the Republic of Slovenia, and representatives of the international organisations Meta Inc.(USA), Locate International (UK), and the Ludwig-Maximilian University (Munich).

The conference will be held at Hotel Lev, Vošnjakova 1, Ljubljana.

The programme for the media, on Tuesday, 18 October 2022, is as follows:

9.00 Opening and welcome addresses

9.40 Statements from Tatjana Bobnar, Minister of the Interior of the Republic of Slovenia, Damjan Miklič, the President of PEN-MP and Head of the Homicide and Sexual Offences Section of the Criminal Police Directorate of the Slovenian Police, Frank Hoen, Founder and Chairman of AMBER Alert Europe, and Emily Vacher, Director of Trust&Safety at Meta Inc. (Hotel Lev, Karantanija Hall)

A press release will be issued after the conference.