The EU Border and Coast Guard Agency, Frontex, marks its 20th anniversary this week as MEPs, rights groups and survivors of abuses at Europe’s borders say that the agency has worsened already lethal conditions while providing a “backdoor into the heart of power” for lobbyists and profiteers.
Action has taken place across Europe to highlight the death toll at Europe’s borders and Frontex’s complicity in it, while an open letter calling for the agency’s abolition has been signed by 79 organisations. The signatories have told European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen that, “Frontex is a deadly, failed experiment which has made countless people less safe, eroded the values and ideals that the European Union claims to hold dear, and provided a backdoor into government for corporate power.”
The letter highlights how the scandal-hit agency’s complicity in abuse has continued since the forced resignation of former executive director Fabrice Leggeri (now a far-right French MP), over Frontex involvement in deadly Aegean Sea pushbacks. Such involvement includes:
- Deployments in Bulgaria and Greece, Frontex missions work with border guards who beat and abuse people seeking safety and chase them through the forests with dogs. In Greece, the agency collaborates with the Hellenic Coast Guard (HCG), which in over 2,000 documented incidents illegally deported more than 55,000 people to Turkiye between 2020 and 2023.
- Operations in the central Mediterranean where Frontex guides violent Libyan militias towards people on boats in distress. Between 2016 and 2023, over 150,000 people have been abducted at sea and potentially imprisoned in Libyan detention camps, where UN experts have documented arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances, torture and sexual violence.
- In North Africa, Frontex works with regimes that detain people in torture camps or leave them for dead in the desert.
Transparency campaigners from Stop Wapenhandel and the Transnational Institute have also pointed out the unprecedented access that Frontex has provided to lobbyists from the arms, border and surveillance industries.
The agency has held hundreds of closed-door meetings with executives, as its budget has skyrocketed by 14,000 per cent since its 2004 funding, with its executive powers expanding in parallel. These relationships are “opaque, clandestine and wide open to misuse”, according to Mark Akkerman, arms industry expert from the Dutch organisation Stop Wapenhandel.
Alaa Hamoudi is a plaintiff in a pending case against Frontex at the Court of Justice of the EU. In April 2020, he was kidnapped on Samos, dragged back to sea, and placed on a rubber boat, where he was pushed and pulled for 17 hours before being abandoned at sea. “Everything the Greeks did to me was funded and supported by Frontex,” said Hamoudi. “Frontex surveillance aircraft flew over the crime scene at least twice that night. A pushback operation is not just torture and trauma; it’s a profound humiliation; being treated as if you are not a human being. When Frontex stands behind the suffering of me and my friends, it feels as if all of Europe wanted us to suffer. And that is the most humiliating thing of all.”
Frontex cannot be reformed, it needs to be abolished,” insisted MEP Ilaria Salis from the Left group in the European Parliament. “Over the past 20 years, Frontex has been complicit in human rights abuses against people trying to reach safety and a better future in the EU. Sometimes it has acted as the member states’ henchman; other times, it has even been the mastermind.”
Nevertheless, she pointed out, this agency has continued to grow and expand, becoming the ultimate symbol of EU policies against migration and the right to asylum. “We need to refocus migration policies by moving away from the far-right narrative of threats and crisis, as well as from the capitalist exploitation of a racialised labour-force. The focus must shift to the affected individuals and communities, so we can build a better future together.”
There is a contradiction at the heart of Frontex that no reform or new face at the top can solve, explained the Abolish Frontex network. “The EU’s aim of preventing people in need of protection from seeking asylum is impossible to achieve without violating human rights and international law. And it is the reason why we are demanding the abolition of the agency and a complete overhaul of the EU’s migration policy, so that it focuses on protecting people’s lives and their right to move instead of trying everything to deter them.”
The rights organisations argue that the agency has failed in its self-declared mission to manage borders in line with fundamental human rights, and have warned against the EU continuing to grant new funding and power to the agency.
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