On 26 February 2024, the European Ombudsman issued a decision OI/3/2023/MHZ on the fundamental rights obligations of Frontex with regard to search and rescue in the context of its maritime ...surveillance activities. While affirming Frontex’s compliance with the applicable rules and protocols, the inquiry exposed significant shortcomings in how the Agency handles maritime incidents, including the issuance of emergency signals. Given the persistent scale of recurrent shipwrecks, I argue that integrating AI systems into Frontex’s activities has the capacity to significantly improve the decision-making process in responding to boats in potential distress and the overall SAR system.
Shielding Frontex Joyce De Coninck
Verfassungsblog,
09/2023
2366-7044
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
In a landmark case, the EU General Court ruled this week on liability claims against Frontex for human rights violations - and rejected the damage claim. The case was the first of its kind concerning ...human rights responsibility of Frontex and had all the ingredients to prompt the General Court to finally clarify a number of pervasive and urgent questions concerning Frontex responsibility for complicity in unlawful human rights conduct. Instead, by conflating the wrongful conduct under scrutiny, the Court prevents a critical examination of Frontex’s conduct altogether. The significance of the case thus lies in the adopted approach by the Court, which, in effect, contributes to the systematic shielding of Frontex from any responsibility for contributions to human rights harms.
The article analyzes the operational institutions established at the community level for the fight against clandestine immigration through fraudulent border crossing, with the intention of entering ...the European Union states and the measures required regarding the intensification of control and the strengthening of surveillance of their maritime borders. The most important conceptual landmarks from a legal point of view are briefly analyzed, regarding the institutions entitled to take measures regarding the security of the maritime border, regarding the delimitation of the territorial sea as an institution of the international law of the sea in the context of the current significant challenges.
This book analyses torture, inhuman and degrading treatment towards migrants worldwide, integrating overviews from several contexts and disciplines. It highlights that today migrants’ mistreatment is ...a global phenomenon, a frequent element of the migratory experience (in countries of departure, of transit, of arrival), an intrinsic component of state policies, and an extreme form of that structural violence which is inherent to the contemporary war on migrants at the global level.
In early 2021, the European Parliament established the Frontex Scrutiny Working Group (FSWG) to monitor all aspects of the functioning of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex). The ...FSWG organized a series of public hearings and carried out a ‘fact-finding’ investigation to gather information and evidence about pushbacks of refugees in the Aegean Sea. By unpacking some of the controversies that emerged during the hearings of the FSWG, I explore how secrecy was practised and strategically employed to obscure the responsibility of Frontex for the reported pushbacks, and how it was contested through the presentation of related evidence. I explain how secrecy and related controversies and struggles over making pushbacks public involve a variety of actors that enrol and interact with a heterogeneous set of objects, including digital, visual and archival traces of violence at sea, as well as databases used to record information about maritime incidents. I argue that secrecy regarding pushbacks is not just about keeping information about people and objects involved in security operations hidden. Secrecy is also produced through the selective recording, (mis)categorization and circulation of information in the name of transparency.
An investigation by the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) on allegations of misconduct within Frontex ended with a report classified as confidential, which was therefore only accessible to the ...agency’s Management Board. Shortly after submission of the report, Frontex’ Executive Director (ED), Fabrice Leggeri, resigned, opening up a new cycle in the governance of the agency. Following up on this, the European Parliament (EP) decided to postpone the discharge of Frontex’ budget on the ground of lacking information with regard to the subject of the OLAF report. In this contribution, I argue that the EP’s refusal to approve the discharge of the budget of Frontex, even though having little impact on the financial stability of the agency, is a tool to enable the political accountability of Frontex.
Following the EU General Court’s dismissal of the complaint of WS and other asylum seekers against Frontex in its ruling on September 6, 2023, scholarly commentary has largely expressed ...disappointment. However, a more optimistic way of reading the judgement is also possible. By declaring the lawsuit admissible, the court confirmed that factual misconduct by Frontex can be addressed with action for damages claims – and this in itself is a major step forward in the system of fundamental rights protection in the European Union.
Sudden rises in migration across the borders of the Global North have persistently attracted substantial media attention and fueled hostility toward “irregular migrants” and “bogus refugees.” While ...existing qualitative studies have extensively criticized the migrant-refugee distinction, we offer unique quantitative evidence of how migration numbers and labels construct impressions of increased irregular migration while in fact creating “fake illegals.” We conduct a two-stage mixed-method analysis, demonstrating first that data on “irregular/illegal border crossings” (IBCs) published by Frontex have become an authoritative source of information on migration flows cited in a corpus of mainstream news media articles. We then posit that, while persecutions and violence in countries of origin may trigger migration, it is policies in destination states that determine who “is” and “isn’t” a refugee. In turn, we develop a novel method to divide IBCs into those who would likely obtain asylum in 31 European destination states (“likely refugees”) and those who would not (“likely irregular migrants”) across time given asylum acceptance rates by nationality. We estimate that between 2009 and 2021 most border crossers labeled as “irregular/illegal” (55.4%) were actually “likely refugees,” a proportion we estimate to be 75.5% at the peak of arrivals in 2015. Thus, we find that sudden and large increases in border crossings concentrated in space likely concern forced rather than irregular migrants. Altogether, our constructivist approach reveals how migration data and categories both influence and are influenced by securitized border policies and that, in this respect, borders start with numbers.
This article discusses the readiness of information exchange of law enforcement agencies in the EU. In context of the outbreak of COVID-19 there is a need for effective information exchange between ...law enforcement agencies. The need for intensified information exchange and gathering relevant data is necessary in order to tackle organized crime in the EU. COVID-19 has shown the complexity of security and health issues and the limited institutional capacity of states to deal the crisis individually. The authors argue that the EU and its member states face a challenging security environment in which information exchange is the most relevant tool for managing the crisis.
Over the last year and a half, the European Border Coast Guard Agency has been under an unprecedented scrutiny. The Frontex saga started in 2020 when investigative journalists published ...ground-breaking findings, revealing how the Agency was breaching the law being complicit with human rights violations committed by Greek authorities. National Parliaments could play a bigger ole in monitoring Frontex, serving as a complementary avenue for democratic oversight, in addition to the European Parliament.
