Few people have heard of the #International_Centre_for_Migration_Policy_Development. But it is increasingly influencing the EU’s approach to migration, while receiving millions of euros to enact the bloc’s policies. In Lebanon, its opaque approach to border projects has led to questions.
Early October. Israel has just launched its ground offensive in southern Lebanon and the residents of the capital Beirut are tense. Israeli surveillance drones fly menacingly above the apartment buildings.
Locals, as well as displaced Syrians and Palestinians, are scrambling for shelter. Usually lively neighbourhoods in the south of the capital are deserted, the target of bombardments from Israeli forces in their fight against the armed group Hezbollah.
The current war in Lebanon is expected to lead to a vast new flow of refugees across the region, many of them into Europe. One million people have already fled the violence.
Less than six months ago, Brussels pinned its hopes on this country to tackle migration, one of Europe’s thorniest issues.
In early May, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati sealed an agreement to prevent illegal migration and migrant smuggling, financed by European taxpayers. Von der Leyen said Europe was ‘counting on [Lebanon’s] cooperation’.
Since the war in Syria sent more than a million migrants across the Mediterranean in 2015, deterring and returning migrants has become central to Europe’s migration policy.
Like similar deals with Libya , Tunisia and Egypt , the agreement with Lebanon was nominally intended to address national needs such as education, public health and the economy. But above all, the hundreds of millions that Brussels had freed up were intended to stem migration.
Not mentioned anywhere in those deals, though key to their contents and implementation, is a little known organisation called the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (#ICMPD).
The ICMPD, an intergovernmental organisation, was founded in the 1990s to increase cooperation on migration between countries. It now has hundreds of staff members in dozens of offices around the world.
Based in Vienna, in a gleaming office complex near the Danube River, the centre has in recent years helped the migration and border policy that Europe is rolling out in Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere, a Follow the Money investigation shows.
The ICMPD has attracted millions of euros in funds and tenders. But it operates largely away from democratic oversight, while its projects in Lebanon are, in the eyes of critics, opaque and ill-equipped to deal with the realities on the ground.
Brussels’ indispensable helper
On 22 April 2020, #Michael_Spindelegger, the director of ICMPD and a former vice-chancellor of Austria, was granted an online audience with Margaritis Schinas, the vice-president of the European Commission who was then responsible for migration.
The ICMPD had published a series of recommendations a few months earlier on how to strengthen cooperation with non-EU countries on ‘irregular migration’.
Schinas was keen to know what ICMPD thought of the bloc’s plans for a new migration pact and wanted to thank the organisation for its work, minutes of that meeting show.
It was not the first time Brussels had relied on ICMPD. For years the EU has drawn up policy strategies together with the organisation and implemented them.
The ICMPD organises training sessions around border management and security, procures materials, and applies for and issues calls for tenders.
Just one day later, on 23 April 2020, the ICMPD met with the bloc’s interior affairs commissioner, Ylva Johansson. In that meeting, the commissioner wanted to know “what ICMPD could do more to support the Commission” while welcoming “ICMPD’s support on its migration matters,” the minutes of the meetings show.
Since the start of Ursula von der Leyen’s presidency of the European Commission in 2019, ICMPD has had no fewer than 19 meetings with the Commission. Eight of those were with Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson and her cabinet. It had only had nine meetings in the four years before von der Leyen took the presidency.
The meetings in April 2020 would be the beginning of a new, fruitful period of cooperation reflected in a significant increase in funds coming from Brussels.
Five months later, the Commission presented its new migration pact, aimed at establishing a common asylum policy and managing migration.
After years of wrangling between member states, the Council of the EU finally signed off on the agreement in May 2024. The deal set out plans on how to secure the EU’s external borders, establish standards for asylum applications, and tackle the smuggling of migrants.
While Johansson celebrated the pact as “an amazing achievement”, thanking politicians and their assistants for their hard work, ICMPD didn’t get a single mention – despite the centre’s influence on the deal.
From implementing the pre-screening of migrants in their country of origin to methods of data processing at borders, the Commission made sure its migration policy was in line with ICMPD’s recommendations.
But keeping a low profile and using informal channels have been part of ICMPD’s trademark for years; Spindelegger himself argues this is the best way for “open, inclusive, and frank discussions”.
The organisation was established by Switzerland and Austria in 1993 when thousands of people arrived in Europe after fleeing the Balkan Wars. The two countries wanted to create an organisation as a platform for “informal consultations and efficient services” relating to migration and asylum matters.
‘As much funding as possible’
Since its founding, the ICMPD has not only expanded in terms of member countries. The organisation has also expanded into projects such as providing workshops and training to combat human trafficking.
Activities increased after Spindelegger stepped in as managing director in 2016, according to former employees and the organisation’s annual reports.
Before then, Spindelegger was a member of the centre-right Austrian party ÖVP and had forged a career in his home country as the minister of finance, minister for foreign affairs and vice-chancellor.
When Spindelegger came on board, the ICMPD began to shift its focus, three former employees told Follow the Money on conditions of anonymity.
Human rights were no longer the main area of concern. Securing funding and implementing projects tied to defence issues became paramount, the employees said.
“For him, success was clear: having as much funding as possible. He talked about that every year during his speeches. He would then jubilantly say that we have doubled the budget,” one of them said.
The year after Spindelegger joined, the ICMPD announced in its annual report that it would also tackle security-related issues, such as tightening border controls. With this, the organisation accommodated the changing political climate among its member states and the Commission, its biggest backer.
This came amid a shift in the EU’s migration policy towards increasing militarisation, with, for example, the Commission emphasising the need to reinforce external borders and the bloc’s border agency, Frontex, seeing its funding increase almost six-fold within the space of a few years.
The ICMPD said that it has, from the start, tailored its strategy to the needs of its partners. “The extent of procurement activities depends on the needs of the respective authorities, countries and regions,” an ICMPD spokesperson said.
That the organisation is growing more important is also reflected in the number of employees, more than doubling from around 200 in 2016 to 500 in 2023. In March 2024, it moved out of a historic building in Vienna’s old town to the new office complex near the Danube.
In the eight years of Spindelegger’s directorship, the IMCPD has managed to increase its annual revenue fivefold. In just two years, the budget for projects managed by the ICMPD has more than doubled: from 371 to 700 million euros by 2023.
By now, the organisation has grown to 21 countries who pay a total of 1.7 million euros for membership fees. This pales in comparison, however, to the money countries spend on specific projects: in 2023, for example, the ICMPD received some 116 million euros for individual projects, for example assistance to the Lebanese armed forces.
But by far the largest single funder is that of the European Commission: in 2023, Brussels sent 93 million euros to the organisation, unpublished annual reports obtained by Follow the Money obtained show − three times the amount as the year before.
While the report gives some clarity on where the organisation’s money comes from, it remains unclear how successful its projects are.
Strategies and training
What the work of the ICMPD amounts to in practice is well illustrated in Lebanon.
Here, the organisation is considered the primary partner in implementing migration and border policies with and on behalf of the EU and European countries.
That policy is intended to prevent large numbers of Syrian refugees – some 1.5 million of whom live in Lebanon – coming to Europe by sea by ramping up border controls and stopping ships carrying migrants from entering the bloc’s waters.
According to the ICMPD’s annual report, the organisation spent a total of almost 4 million euros in 2022 and 2023 for what it calls Integrated Border Management (IBM) projects in Lebanon, largely funded by the EU, Switzerland and the Netherlands, to fight against terrorism and serious cross-border crime.
This money is used, among other things, to purchase defence equipment and train security forces, teaching them how to tighten border controls and combat drugs and arms smuggling.
The ICMPD and the EU are also working with the Lebanese government on reforms of its national security strategy.
This isn’t an isolated case: the ICMPD has become involved in the procurement of defence equipment to manage migration hotspots more broadly. Figures from 2023 show that equipment purchases accounted for 21 per cent of the total budget.
This is particularly problematic because, according to many experts, these European border externalisation policies often clash with international human rights law.
As well as spending money on defence strategies in Lebanon, for example, the organisation won a tender to the tune of almost 1 million euros to supply surveillance radars for the management of Albania’s borders, which brought the ICMPD criticism.
In Tunisia the ICMPD provided “technology and training [...] to the coast guard, which is increasingly used to commit human rights violations against migrants and refugees,” according to research by the nonprofit news website Coda Story. This was first investigated and reported by the Berlin based NGO FragDenStaat.
While the EU is giving ever more funding to the ICMPD, several experts told Follow the Money that they have reservations about the efficacy of the Lebanese strategy.
Jasmin Diab, migration expert and director of the Institute for Migration Studies at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, said the current projects ignore conflicts Lebanon has faced for decades.
Thousands of people still arrive in Lebanon from Syria each year; the security services still lack funding, while drug-, people-, and weapons-smugglers have almost free rein. Security forces remain divided along political-sectarian lines, as do the politicians: for example, Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed armed group and political party, controls much of the border with Syria, where it is involved in smuggling drugs and weapons and human trafficking.
In this context, the Integrated Border Management plans amount to little more than empty promises, Diab said.
“The vagueness in which it is written makes it non-implementable, and it also comes across as being completely misinformed in its ambitions,” Diab said.
An agreement to create a unified surveillance model of the Lebanese-Syrian border that would allow the entire frontier to be controlled, had a deadline of 31 December 2023 – but is still far from being implemented.
A former ICMPD employee thinks his former employer is taking on tasks too big to handle. “I see them holding all kinds of workshops, but that IBM strategy still hasn’t been implemented after all these years. Nor will it be.”
Lack of oversight
While the reach of ICMPD has expanded, public scrutiny of the centre remains minimal.
It has moved from an organisation focused on setting up conferences and conducting research on migration flows to more active work such as acquiring defence equipment and training security forces.
This means that Europe’s migration policy is increasingly placed in the hands of an organisation that is not part of any government and thus cannot be held accountable as such.
“The ICMPD is now effectively an executive arm,” researcher Sofian Naceur said.
Jan Klabbers, a professor at the University of Helsinki who researches international organisations, said that this approach of relying on informal channels meant that “people’s rights can be trampled on without anyone realising it”.
The ICMPD insists that informal meetings are important to its work.
“Informal consultations play a crucial role in fostering successful cooperation,” a spokesperson said. “They provide a platform for open dialogue, exchange of ideas, and trust- and consensus-building among stakeholders.”
The ICMPD did not reply to questions about how much of their budget goes towards holding such meetings.
An external audit of the ICMPD’s ongoing activities in Lebanon was carried out in 2022 by NIRAS consulting, commissioned by the EU. When Follow the Money asked ICMPD for a copy of the report, the organisation referred the request to the European Commission, which said the evaluation was “not public”.
In Klabbers’ opinion, this opaque set-up is precisely why such organisations are founded.
“The raison d’être of such entities is to stay below the surface to avoid democratic scrutiny, to also prevent courts from ever looking at them,” he said.
This lack of accountability was particularly problematic, said Green EU lawmaker Tineke Strik, because the projects the EU sent the ICMPD money for were paid from public funds.
“This allows the EU to deliberately evade transparency requirements, democratic control and legal liability if things go wrong,” she said. “It is all the more worrying that this happens precisely in the area of migration and border policy, where vulnerabilities are so great and human rights violations are unfortunately a daily reality.”
