NGOs (non-governmental organisations) seem in 1,058 paperwork held by EU border power Frontex as a part of its anti-smuggling operation with Europol, the EU’s police company.
The knowledge was collected throughout Frontex debriefing interviews with detained migrants and asylum seekers.
Operational knowledge collected throughout Frontex debriefs is then shared with Europol, in its wider efforts to crack down on smuggling and human trafficking.
Uku Särekanno, Frontex’s deputy director, instructed MEPs final yr that the debriefs had led to some 13,000 doable suspects between 2016 and 2022.
He mentioned debriefing studies get a authorized examine and a stamp of approval from the internet hosting member state earlier than being shared.
However asylum seekers being interrogated by a Frontex officer can also really feel pressured to reveal info, out of concern of getting their claims one way or the other rejected.
Given the sensitivity, it was solely earlier this yr that the company’s rights displays got the specific permission to confirm such debriefs.
The criminalisation of activists serving to refugees and asylum seekers all through a lot of the EU has led to convictions in Greece, for example.
However with some now probably ending up on Europol police database, the difficulty might elevate further alarms.
A freedom of entry request, filed by EUobserver, revealed that Frontex had 1,058 debrief paperwork the place the phrase “NGO” seems.
However Frontex refused to launch any of these paperwork as a result of they handled the whole lot from migrant smuggling routes to “the involvement of facilitators and traffickers in human beings.”
When queried, a Frontex spokesperson mentioned the collected info helps prison investigations in member states.
Requested if this included the named NGOs contained within the debriefing paperwork, he didn’t affirm or deny.
Final yr, Europol’s migrant smuggling centre acquired 2,500 “knowledge packages” from the Frontex debriefs.
These knowledge packages included descriptions of individuals, communications, places and roughly 290 “organisations.”
A Europol spokesperson mentioned the centre didn’t course of any knowledge in 2022 associated to NGOs “when managing the knowledge movement from Frontex on migrant debriefings.”
However she additionally mentioned that the ontology of Europol’s databases doesn’t embody the class ‘NGO’ or ‘Non-Governmental Organisation.
“The closest worth in our databases can be ‘Non-Business Organisation’,” she mentioned.
She additionally mentioned that an “organisation” can solely be processed by Europol if the migrant has clearly said that this entity is often utilized by smugglers to facilitate their prison exercise.
“In that regard, we can’t rule out that Europol might have previously acquired info by way of Frontex wherein migrants had clearly hyperlink [sic] entities with prison actions,” she mentioned, in an e-mail.
For its half, the European Information Safety Supervisor (EDPS) carried out an audit at Frontex final October.
“We did an audit about processing of private knowledge within the context of debriefing interviews at Frontex,” mentioned a EDPS spokesperson, in an e-mail.
He mentioned they’d discovered no reference to NGOs within the pattern studies they’d checked. However the company will now attain out to Frontex once more he mentioned given they maintain over 1,000 paperwork the place NGOs are cited.
“In view of the knowledge supplied we are going to contact Frontex and ask them to make clear,” he mentioned.
