Unlawful border crossings into the EU have elevated by 77% this yr as compared with 2021, in keeping with a Frontex report seen by EURACTIV on Thursday (1 December).
In line with the EU coast guard, 281,000 folks illegally crossed the EU’s borders between January and October, numbers that underscore the difficulties going through the bloc’s migration and asylum system.
The elevated migration flows have additionally prompted new questions concerning the position of Frontex.
Between the top of 2020 and starting 2021, EU’s anti-fraud watchdog (OLAF) performed an investigation of Frontex’s behaviour on the border between Turkey and Greece in 2020, and concluded that the EU coast guard haven’t prevented unlawful pushbacks of migrants on the border, violating human rights.
The top of the EU coast guard company resigned in April 2022 after he was requested to touch upon OLAF’s findings.
The report was shared with media in mid-October, and Frontex publicly replied in a observe, stating that “these have been practices of the previous”.
The transition
Since then, Frontex has made main adjustments to its administration.
The European Parliament civil liberties committee hosted a listening to on Wednesday (30 November) for the three candidates nominated by the European Fee to steer the company.
Terezika Gras, the present state Secretary on the Croatian Inside Ministry, and Hans Leijtens, a excessive rating navy official from The Netherlands, are competing with the present interim director Aija Kalnaja for the job.
On the centre of the dialogue with MEPs was the query on how the brand new administration will assure the respect of human rights and safety of EU borders on the identical time.
In an interview with EURACTIV, Lena Düpont MEP stated that Frontex was “one of the necessary EU businesses” and that the allegations of pushbacks and Frontex’s operations within the Mediterranean Sea have been the principle cause for the creation of the Parliament’s Frontex Scrutiny Working Group.
The working group’s first report in July 2021 concluded that “there was no involvement of the company in alleged pushbacks. However, we noticed that there’s an ecosystem of accountability which the company is positioned in,” Dupont stated.
The group additionally urged a sequence of inner reforms “particularly in terms of the incorporation of basic rights questions into operational planning, but additionally the best way the basic rights officer and his basic rights displays are capable of work inside the company,” the MEP stated.
[Edited by Benjamin Fox]
