Tomas Statius / X
▻https://twitter.com/TomasStatius/status/1760214082014020003
Pendant 3 ans, j’ai travaillé au sein de LHreports et avec d’autres journalistes (du Monde, du Spiegel, du Guardian) sur #Frontex. Quelques réflexions sur la candidature de son ancien directeur, Fabrice #Leggeri sur une liste #RN et ce qui en est dit. Un fil 🧶
]]>Elections européennes : Fabrice Leggeri, ex-directeur de Frontex, rejoint la liste du #Rassemblement_national
L’ancien responsable de l’agence européenne chargée du contrôle des frontières avait démissionné en 2022, visé par une enquête disciplinaire de l’Office européen de lutte antifraude. « Nous sommes déterminés à combattre la #submersion_migratoire », a déclaré M. Leggeri au « Journal du Dimanche ».
►https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2024/02/17/elections-europeennes-fabrice-leggeri-ex-directeur-de-frontex-rejoint-la-lis
#élections_européennes #Leggeri #Fabrice_Leggeri #Frontex #extrême_droite #RN
]]>#Frontex : « Sa #mission première est bien de garantir un contrôle des frontières extérieures », rappelle le Sénat
C’est une enquête de l’Office de lutte antifraude (OLAF), mettant notamment en évidence cas présumés illégaux de « pushback » (refoulements) de migrants, notamment en mer Egée, qui avait précipité la démission de Fabrice Leggeri, l’ancien directeur français de Frontex, en mai dernier. Aija Kalnaja, directrice par intérim de Frontex, avait assuré il y a quelques semaines devant les sénateurs que 46 vérificateurs avaient été recrutés en octobre dernier, afin de vérifier la bonne garantie des droits fondamentaux aux frontières de l’Europe.
Droits fondamentaux contre contrôles aux frontières : « Ce débat est en grande partie artificiel »
La proposition de résolution européenne (PPRE) du Sénat, présentée par Jean-François Rapin, président LR de la commission des Affaires européennes, et François-Noël Buffet, président LR de la commission des Lois, « regrette » que ce rapport de l’OLAF « n’ait toujours pas été rendu public », alors qu’il « fait l’objet de ‘fuites’ régulières dans la presse. » Toujours est-il que l’exposé des motifs de cette PPRE rappelle que M. Leggeri avait mis sa démission sur le compte d’un « glissement », depuis 2019, des missions de l’Agence vers le respect des droits fondamentaux plutôt que sur le contrôle des frontières extérieures.
Un « glissement » que le Sénat réfute dans cette proposition de résolution européenne, qui n’est pas un texte juridique contraignant, mais un message politique envoyé à l’Union européenne. « Ce débat, qui existe bel et bien, est toutefois en grande partie artificiel : en effet, Frontex doit exercer ses missions dans le respect des droits de l’Homme mais sa mission première est bien de garantir un contrôle efficace des frontières extérieures contre l’immigration irrégulière », expliquent ainsi Jean-François Rapin et François-Noël Buffet.
« L’agence n’a aucunement vocation à surveiller le respect des droits fondamentaux par les États membres »
Dans cette résolution, la majorité sénatoriale propose ainsi certaines pistes pour améliorer le fonctionnement de Frontex dans la « crise » actuelle que l’agence traverse. Premièrement, les présidents Rapin et Buffet préconisent de mettre en place un « pilotage » plus « politique » de l’agence, en regrettant l’absence de candidature française au poste de directeur et « l’excessive longueur » de la procédure de désignation.
La proposition de #résolution entend aussi réaffirmer le rôle de soutien aux Etats-membres de Frontex, « qui intervient exclusivement en réponse aux demandes d’un Etat membre et sous son autorité. » Les sénateurs estiment, par conséquent, que « les personnels de Frontex ne sauraient être tenus responsables d’éventuelles violations des droits fondamentaux commises par les services de l’État partenaire » et que « l’agence n’a aucunement vocation à surveiller le respect des droits fondamentaux par les États membres. »
Jean-François Rapin et François-Noël Buffet proposent de mettre en place, dans chaque Parlement national, un « groupe de contrôle parlementaire conjoint, sur le modèle de celui établi pour contrôler les activités d’Europol », afin de garantir « la nécessaire association des parlements nationaux au contrôle de Frontex. »
▻https://www.publicsenat.fr/article/politique/frontex-sa-mission-premiere-est-bien-de-garantir-un-controle-des-frontie
#frontières #contrôles_frontaliers #migrations #asile #réfugiés
#le_mérite_d'être_clair #missions #surveillance_des_frontières
Italy’s government is targeting NGOs saving people at sea. It is nothing new.
I was there the first time around – and so were many journalists. At @open_migration we told the story of the dirty war waged against NGOs saving lives.
This story starts on Easter weekend, 2017.
During that weekend, 8,300 people were rescued in the Mediterranean: 1,300 by Frontex and the others by several NGOs in coordination with the Italian Coast Guard.
@Giu_Bertoluzzi was on board of one of the ships – this is her logbook:
▻https://openmigration.org/en/analyses/the-eight-thousand-migrants-saved-at-easter-logbook-of-a-rescue-missi
“Too smart for their own good” (Renzi, then Italy’s PM), “Taxi cabs for migrants” (Di Maio).
That weekend marked the start of the smear campaign against NGOs: @Lorenzo_Bagnoli @FraFloris made sense of the mix of unfounded claims and accusations:
▻https://openmigration.org/en/analyses/accusations-against-ngos-at-sea-what-is-false-or-misleading-in-that-s
It was also the start of the infamous “pull factor” claim, coming – no surprise – from Fabrice Leggeri, then executive director of Frontex.
He would become a central figure in this political game - this is the last we heard of him:
►https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/fabrice-leggeri-s-resignation-the-final-days-of-the-frontex-chief-a-a238224a
That summer the Mediterranean was the scene of a brutal political game, with the Italian government working to delegitimize NGOs.
“They have been forced to back away from, sometimes even renounce, their role in rescuing migrants” explained @alaskaHQ.
▻https://openmigration.org/en/analyses/eight-things-we-have-learnt-from-the-papers-on-the-iuventa
A main feature was of course the Minniti-sponsored code of conduct for NGOs.
This legitimized the idea that they were acting in anarchy before this measures, while all the while they had been working under the Rome command of the Italian Coast Guard.
▻https://openmigration.org/en/analyses/what-is-changing-in-the-med-five-things-you-must-know
The militarisation of the Mediterranean continued throughout 2018, with a critical point with the seizure of Open Arms and accusations of criminal conspiracy and aiding illegal immigration.
@alaskaHQ @Lorenzo_Bagnoli and @clatorrisi reported:
▻https://openmigration.org/en/analyses/the-prosecutors-case-against-the-rescue-ship-open-arms
Accusations were dropped and one month later the Open Arms was free to sail again.
(Meanwhile Frontex was relaunching fears of terrorist attacks while introducing its new programme to secure European borders)
▻https://openmigration.org/en/analyses/the-open-arms-case-continued-new-documents-and-malta
I’d like for this story to have an end but there isn’t one.
In 2017, Easter weekend marked the start of a dirty, dirty war that has claimed thousand of lives. NGOs were witnesses that the EU and the Italian government did not want around.
And that is still the case.
#chronologie #criminalisation_du_sauvetage #sauvetage #migrations #asile #réfugiés #Méditerranée #mer_Méditerranée #taxi #taxi_del_mare #pull_factor #facteur_pull #rhétorique #solidarité #Di_Maio #Luigi_Di_Maio #Matteo_Renzi #Renzi #Italie #rhétorique #accusations #Leggeri #Fabrizio_Leggeri #Frontex #codice_di_condotta #Minniti
]]>Le #rapport qui accable #Frontex, l’agence européenne de gardes-#frontières, et sa pratique de refouler illégalement les migrants en #Grèce
Ce document, que « Le Monde » et ses partenaires de Lighthouse Reports et l’hebdomadaire allemand « Der Spiegel » ont pu consulter, accuse l’ancienne direction. A Bruxelles, le rapport est réputé si toxique que personne ne voudrait le lire
Le 15 février, l’Office européen de lutte antifraude (#OLAF) rendait ses conclusions, au terme d’un an d’enquête, sur la gestion au sein de Frontex de l’épineuse question des « #pushbacks ». Voilà des années que les gardes-côtes grecs sont accusés de pratiquer ces refoulements de migrants, contraires à la convention de Genève, sous l’œil, complice, de l’agence la plus riche de l’Union européenne.
Le rapport, qui a en partie provoqué la chute de l’ancien directeur Fabrice Leggeri, est depuis au centre d’une bataille entre la Commission et les parlementaires européens, qui font feu de tout bois pour obtenir sa publication. A Bruxelles, le document, connu d’un nombre restreint de fonctionnaires et d’élus, est réputé si toxique que personne ne voudrait le lire. La nouvelle directrice de Frontex, la Lettonne Aija Kalnaja, a assuré ne pas en avoir pris connaissance. Et le vice-président de la Commission, le Grec Margaritis Schinas, un soutien historique de Fabrice Leggeri, a refusé de dire en séance s’il l’avait lu ou non.
Ce rapport, que Le Monde et ses partenaires de Lighthouse Reports, ainsi que l’hebdomadaire allemand Der Spiegel, ont pu consulter, détaille par le menu les péchés de la super-agence européenne de gardes-côtes et de gardes-frontières ainsi que les excès de sa précédente direction. Il confirme également l’utilisation massive de la technique illégale du « pushback » par les autorités grecques pour décourager les migrants de pénétrer sur le sol européen. Ainsi que la connaissance détaillée qu’avait Frontex du phénomène.
« Ces #expulsions doivent cesser »
Face à ces révélations, difficile de ne pas s’interroger sur la position de la #Commission_européenne. Cette dernière, qui a pris connaissance des conclusions de l’OLAF fin février, n’a mis que récemment en garde la Grèce face à la fréquence des accusations de violation des droits de l’homme dont elle fait l’objet. Sans remettre en cause, pour l’heure, le déploiement de Frontex sur la péninsule. « La protection de la frontière extérieure de l’UE contre les entrées illégales est une obligation. Mais les expulsions violentes et illégales de migrants doivent cesser, maintenant », a tonné Ylva Johansson, commissaire européenne chargée des affaires intérieures, à l’issue d’un appel avec trois membres de l’exécutif grec, dont le ministre de la police, le 30 juin. Cinq jours plus tard, face aux parlementaires européens, le premier ministre grec, #Kyriakos_Mitsotakis, a quant à lui balayé la plupart de ces accusations, les qualifiant de « propagande turque ».
Dans les médias, voilà des mois que l’homme et son camp s’évertuent à nier l’importance du cas grec dans les turbulences que traverse Frontex, après la démission de son ancien directeur exécutif, le 29 avril. « L’opposition essaie, sans succès, de lier son départ avec ces prétendus “pushbacks” », a ainsi déclaré le ministre de l’intérieur, Notis Mitarachi, devant son propre Parlement. La situation en Grèce est pourtant le fil rouge des enquêteurs de l’OLAF. Dans leur rapport de 129 pages, ces derniers confirment tout ce que les médias, dont Le Monde, ont écrit sur le sujet depuis plus de deux ans. Pis, ils révèlent que les faits étaient largement connus, et même dénoncés au sein de Frontex.
Ainsi, dès avril 2020, deux divisions de l’agence jugeaient « crédibles » les #accusations fréquentes de traitements violents de la part des policiers grecs infligés aux migrants qui tentaient de rejoindre leurs côtes. « Le fait que les Grecs tolèrent et pratiquent les “pushbacks” est très probable », jugeait la division d’évaluation de la vulnérabilité de Frontex dans un rapport daté du 18 avril 2020, cité par l’OLAF.
Un an plus tard, le centre de situation de Frontex, sa tour de contrôle, chargée de surveiller en direct les frontières extérieures de l’Union européenne grâce à sa batterie de caméras, suggérait même l’ouverture d’une enquête interne sur la base de nouvelles images transmises par l’ambassadeur de Turquie en Pologne, directement au siège de l’agence.
Face à ces conclusions, émanant de ses propres services, la réponse de la direction de l’agence est toujours la même, assure l’OLAF. Cantonner les découvertes au plus petit cercle possible. Eviter la contagion. « Il y avait un schéma récurrent [de la part de la direction] dans le fait de vouloir cacher des informations et éviter toute #responsabilité », note un agent de Frontex. « Je pense qu’à l’époque #Fabrice_Leggeri voulait protéger la Grèce. C’est le pays que l’agence soutient le plus. Mais personne ne comprend pourquoi il a pris ce risque », se souvient l’un de ses proches.
Volonté de « couvrir » la Grèce
Le 5 août 2020, à 1 h 41 du matin, un avion de Frontex est ainsi témoin d’un « pushback ». Ce qu’il filme est troublant : un navire grec traîne un canot pneumatique, trente migrants à son bord, en direction des eaux territoriales turques, au lieu de les ramener à terre. « La manœuvre n’a aucun sens en matière de sauvetage », se lamente l’un des agents de Frontex dans un rapport d’incident adressé à son supérieur dans la matinée qui suit les faits.
L’avion de Frontex est finalement sommé de quitter les lieux par les autorités hellènes, envoyé dans une zone « où il ne détecte plus aucune activité ». « Je considérais ces événements comme des “pushbacks” », se souvient un des agents interrogés par l’OLAF, avant de confesser l’interdiction formelle d’enquêter en interne et la volonté ferme de la direction de « couvrir » la Grèce « en raison du contexte international ». « La répétition de ces événements est de plus en plus difficile à gérer », renchérit le premier.
Deux options s’offrent à Frontex, opine un autre, à la suite de l’incident. « Parler aux Grecs » ou retirer les avions de Frontex pour ne plus être témoin de telles manœuvres. Une solution « cynique », reconnaît un agent, mais qui préserve Frontex de futures turbulences ou autres « risques en matière de réputation ». Varsovie choisira la seconde option. Plusieurs témoins assurent que la manœuvre avait pour but de ne plus être témoin de l’intolérable.
Selon les enquêteurs européens, il ne s’agit pourtant pas de la seule alerte reçue par la direction. Ni de la première. Le 5 juillet 2019, un message informe le management que certains agents, déployés dans des Etats membres, rechignent à faire remonter les comportements problématiques dont ils sont les témoins sur le terrain, en raison « des répercussions que cela pourrait avoir pour eux ». C’est particulièrement le cas en Grèce. Fin avril 2020, un agent déployé par Frontex sur place demande l’anonymat au moment de rapporter des faits dont il a été témoin. « Les menaces des autorités grecques ont fini par porter leurs fruits », se lamente l’un de ses supérieurs par écrit.
La conclusion la plus destructrice pour Frontex porte probablement sur son implication financière dans les opérations hellènes. L’OLAF note ainsi qu’au moins six bateaux grecs, cofinancés par l’agence, auraient été impliqués dans plus d’une dizaine de refoulements entre avril et décembre 2020. « Nous n’avons trouvé aucune preuve de la participation directe ou indirecte de Frontex dans ces renvois », déclarait Fabrice #Leggeri en janvier 2021. Une ligne qu’il a défendue coûte que coûte jusqu’au bout de son mandat. A tort.
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2022/07/28/refoulement-de-migrants-en-grece-l-enquete-qui-accuse-frontex_6136445_3210.h
#migrations #asile #réfugiés #refoulements #push-backs #de_la_Haye_Jousselin
EU’s Frontex Tripped in Its Plan for ‘Intrusive’ Surveillance of Migrants
Frontex and the European Commission sidelined their own data protection watchdogs in pursuing a much-criticised expansion of “intrusive” data collection from migrants and refugees to feed into Europol’s vast criminal databases, BIRN can reveal.
On November 17 last year, when Hervé Yves Caniard entered the 14-floor conference room of the European Union border agency Frontex in Warsaw, European newspapers were flooded with stories of refugees a few hundreds kilometres away, braving the cold at the Belarusian border with Poland.
A 14-year-old Kurd had died from hypothermia a few days earlier; Polish security forces were firing teargas and water cannon to push people back.
The unfolding crisis was likely a topic of discussion at the Frontex Management Board meeting, but so too was a longer-term policy goal concerning migrants and refugees: the expansion of a mass surveillance programme at Europe’s external borders.
PeDRA, or ‘Processing of Personal Data for Risk Analysis,’ had begun in 2016 as a way for Frontex and the EU police body Europol to exchange data in the wake of the November 2015 Paris attacks by Islamist militants that French authorities had linked to Europe’s then snowballing refugee crisis.
At the November 2021 meeting, Caniard and his boss, Frontex’s then executive director, Fabrice Leggeri, were proposing to ramp it up dramatically, allowing Frontex border guards to collect what some legal experts have called ‘intrusive’ personal data from migrants and asylum seekers, including genetic data and sexual orientation; to store, analyse and share that data with Europol and security agencies of member states; and to scrape social media profiles, all on the premise of cracking down on ‘illegal’ migration and terrorism.
The expanded PeDRA programme would target not just individuals suspected of cross-border crimes such as human trafficking but also the witnesses and victims.
Caniard, the veteran head of the Frontex Legal Unit, had been appointed that August by fellow Frenchman Leggeri to lead the drafting of the new set of internal PeDRA rules. Caniard was also interim director of the agency’s Governance Support Centre, which reported directly to Leggeri, and as such was in a position to control internal vetting of the new PeDRA plan.
That vetting was seriously undermined, according minutes of board meetings leaked by insiders and internal documents obtained via Freedom of Information requests submitted by BIRN.
The evidence gathered by BIRN point to an effort by the Frontex leadership under Leggeri, backed by the European Commission, to sideline EU data protection watchdogs in order to push through the plan, regardless of warnings of institutional overreach, threats to privacy and the criminalisation of migrants.
Nayra Perez, Frontex’s own Data Protection Officer, DPO, warned repeatedly that the PeDRA expansion “cannot be achieved by breaching compliance with EU legislation” and that the programme posed “a serious risk of function creep in relation to the Agency’s mandate.” But her input was largely ignored, documents reveal.
The DPO warned of the possibility of Frontex data being transmitted in bulk, “carte blanche”, to Europol, a body which this year was ordered to delete much of a vast store of personal data that it was found to have amassed unlawfully by the EU’s top data protection watchdog, the European Data Protection Supervisor, EDPS.
Backed by the Commission, Frontex ignored a DPO recommendation that it consult the EDPS, currently led by Polish Wojciech Wiewiórowski, over the new PeDRA rules. In a response for this story, the EDPS warned of the possibility of “unlawful” processing of data by Frontex.
Having initially told BIRN that the DPO’s “advisory and auditing role” had been respected throughout the process, shortly before publication of this story Frontex conceded that Perez’s office “could have been involved more closely to the drafting and entrusted with the role of the chair of the Board”, an ad hoc body tasked with drafting the PeDRA rules.
In June, the EDPS asked Frontex to make multiple amendments to the expanded surveillance programme in order to bring it into line with EU data protection standards; Frontex told BIRN it had now entrusted the DPO to redraft “relevant MB [Management Board] decisions in line with the EDPS recommendations and lessons learned.”
Dr Niovi Vavoula, an expert in EU privacy and criminal law at Queen Mary University of London, said that the expanded PeDRA programme risked the “discriminatory criminalisation” of innocent people, prejudicing the outcomes of criminal proceedings against those flagged as “suspects” by Frontex border guards.
As written, the revamped PeDRA “is another piece of the puzzle of the emerging surveillance and criminalisation of migrants and refugees,” she said.
Religious beliefs, sexual orientation
Leggeri had long held a vision of Frontex as more than simply a ‘border management’ body, one that would see it working in tandem with Europol in matters of law enforcement; to this end, both agencies have been keen to loosen restrictions on the exchange of personal data between them.
Almost six years to the day before the Warsaw PeDRA meeting, a gun and bomb attack by Islamist militants killed 130 people in Paris. It was November 13, 2015, at the height of the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas.
The following month, Leggeri signed a deal with the then head of Europol, Briton Richard Wainwright, which opened the door to the exchange of personal data between the two agencies. Addressing the UK parliament, Wainwright described a “symbiotic” relationship between the agencies in protecting the EU’s borders. In early 2016, a PeDRA pilot project launched in Italy, quickly followed by Greece and Spain.
At the same time, Europol launched its own parallel programme of so-called Secondary Security Checks on migrants and refugees in often cramped, squalid camps in Italy and Greece using facial recognition technology. The checks, most recently expanded to refugees from Ukraine in Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Moldova, were introduced “in order to identify suspected terrorists and criminals” but Europol is tight-lipped about the criteria determining who gets checked and what happens with the data obtained.
Since the launch of PeDRA, Frontex officers have been gathering information from newly-arrived migrants concerning individuals suspected of involvement in smuggling, trafficking or terrorism and transmitting the data to Europol in the form of “personal data packages,” which are then cross-checked against and stored within its criminal databases.
According to its figures, under the PeDRA programme, Frontex has shared the personal data – e.g. names, personal descriptions and phone numbers – of 11,254 people with Europol between 2016 and 2021.
But the 2015 version of the PEDRA programme was only its first incarnation.
Until 2019, rules governing Frontex meant that its capacity to collect and exchange the personal data of migrants had been strictly limited.
In December 2021, after years of acrimonious legal wrangling, the Frontex Management Board – comprising representatives of the 27 EU member states and the European Commission – gave the green light to the expansion of PeDRA.
Under the new rules, which have yet to enter into force, Frontex border guards will be able to collect a much wider range of sensitive personal data from all migrants, including genetic and biometric data, such as DNA, fingerprints or photographs, information on their political and religious beliefs, and sexual orientation.
The agency told BIRN it had not yet started processing personal data “related to sexual orientation” but that the collection of such information may be necessary to “determine whether suspects who appear to be similar are in fact the same.”
In terms of social media monitoring, Frontex said it had not decided yet whether to take advantage of such a tool; minutes of a joint meeting in April, however, show that Frontex and Europol agreed on “strengthening cooperation on social media monitoring”.
Indeed, in 2019, Frontex published plans to pay a surveillance company 400,000 euros to track people on social media, including “civil society and diaspora communities” within the EU, but abandoned it in November of that year after Privacy International questioned the legality of the plan.
Yet, under the expanded PeDRA, Vavoula, of Queen Mary University, said Frontex officers could be tasked without scraping social media profiles “without restrictions”.
Commenting on the entire programme, she added that PeDRA “could not have been drafted by someone with a deep knowledge of data protection law”. She cited numerous violations of elementary data protection safeguards, especially for children, the elderly and other vulnerable individuals, who should generally be treated differently from other subjects.
“Sufficient procedural safeguards should be introduced to ensure the protection of fundamental rights of children to the fullest possible extent including the requirement of justified reasons of such a processing of personal data,” Vavoula said. “Genetic data is much more sensitive than biometric data,” and therefore requires “specific safeguards” not present in the text.
Vavoula also noted the absence of a “maximum retention period,” warning, “Frontex may retain the data forever.”
Internal dissent swept aside
Internal documents seen by BIRN show that the man tasked by Leggeri to oversee the drafting of the new PeDRA rules, Caniard, ignored objections raised by the agency’s own data protection watchdog.
Perez, a Spanish lawyer and Frontex’s DPO, has the task of monitoring the agency’s compliance with EU data protection laws not only concerning the thousands of migrants whose data will be stored in its databases but also of the agency’s rapidly expanding staff base, currently numbering more than 1,900 but soon to include a ‘standing corps’ of up to 10,000 border guards.
She had also been working on earlier drafts of the new PeDRA rules since 2018, only to be leapfrogged by Caniard when he was appointed by Leggeri in August 2021.
When she was shown an advanced draft of the new PeDRA rules in October 2021, Perez did not mince her words. “The process of drafting the new rules de facto encroaches on the tasks legally assigned to the DPO,” she said in an internal Frontex document obtained by BIRN. “When the DPO issues an opinion, such advice cannot be overruled or amended.”
The DPO proposed more than a hundred changes to the draft; she warned that, under the proposed rules, Frontex “seems to arrogate the capacity to police the internet” through monitoring of social media and that victims and witnesses of crime whose data is shared with Europol face “undesirable consequences” of being part of a “pan-European criminal database.”
During intense internal discussions in late 2021, as the deadline for approving the new rules was fast approaching, the DPO said that Frontex had failed to make a compelling case for the collection of sensitive data such as ethnicity or sexual orientation.
“…the legal threshold to be met is not a ‘nice to have’ but a strict necessity,” Perez wrote.
When the final draft landed on the desk of the Frontex Management Board in November 2021, it was clear that many of the DPO’s recommendations had been disregarded.
At this point, Frontex was already the target of a probe by the European Anti-Fraud Office into its role in so-called ‘pushbacks’ in which migrants are illegally turned away at the EU’s borders, the findings of which would eventually force Leggeri’s resignation in April this year.
In an initial written response for this story, Frontex said that the DPO “had an active, pivotal role in the deliberations” concerning the new rules and that the watchdog’s “advisory and auditing role was respected” throughout the process.
Minutes of the November board meeting appeared to contradict this, however. Written in English and partially disclosed following an ‘access to documents request’, they cite Caniard conceding that the DPO was “consulted twice with a very short notice” and that, since Perez issued her opinion only the day before the meeting, there “was no possibility to take stock of it”. Perez submitted her opinion on November 16 and the board meeting was held on November 17 and 18.
The DPO, for its part, urged the management board to “work on the current draft to eliminate inconsistencies” and, though not legally obliged, “to consult the EDPS prior to adoption”.
Prior to publication of this story, BIRN asked Frontex again whether the DPO’s mandate had been respected during the drafting of the new PeDRA rules. The agency backtracked, saying it should have involved Perez’s office more closely and that the DPO would rewrite the programme.
Dissent was not confined to the DPO. Danish and Dutch representatives in the meeting urged the board to delay voting on the rules given that the DPO’s opinions had not been taken on board and to “do its utmost to avoid any situation where it is necessary to amend rules just adopted just because an EDPS’ conflicting opinion is issued.”
According to the minutes of the November meeting, the Commission representative, however, dismissed this, declaring that it considered the text “more than mature for adoption” and that there was no need to consult the EDPS because “it is not mandatory”.
Email exchanges between the Commission and Frontex reveal the urgency with which the Commission wanted the new rules adopted, even at the cost of foregoing EDPS participation.
One, from the Commission to Frontex on November 14, 2021, just days before the Board meeting said that, “while it would have been good to consult the EDPS on everything, it is more important now to get at least the two first decisions adopted.” An earlier mail, from July 2021 and sent directly to Leggeri, said it was “an absolute political priority to put in place the data protection framework of the Agency without any further delays.” That framework included the processing of personal data under PeDRA.
Asked why it supported the expansion of the Frontex surveillance programme without first having the proposal checked by EDPS, the Commission told BIRN it would not comment on “discussion held in the management board or other internal meetings.”
The EDPS, the EU’s top data protection authority, was only shown a copy of the new rules in late January 2022.
Asked for its opinion, the EDPS told BIRN it is “concerned that the rules adopted do not specify with sufficient clarity how the intended processing will be carried out, nor define precisely how safeguards on data protection will be implemented.”
The processing of highly vulnerable categories of individuals, including asylum seekers, could pose “severe risks for fundamental rights and freedoms,” such as the right to asylum, it said. It further stressed that “routine”, i.e. systematic, exchange of personal data between Frontex and Europol is not permitted and that such exchange can only take place “on a case-by-case basis.”
Collecting data with ‘religious’ fervour
Experts question the effectiveness of such extensive data collection in combating serious crime.
Douwe Korff, Emeritus Professor of international law at London Metropolitan University, decried the apparent lack of results and accountability.
“There isn’t even the absolute minimum requirement for law enforcement authorities to provide serious proof that the expansion of surveillance powers will be effective and proportionate,” said Korff, who has contributed to research on mass surveillance for EU institutions for years.
“If you ask how many people have you arrested using this data that are completely innocent, they don’t even want to know about this. They pursue this policy of mass data collection with a religious belief.”
Indeed, when the EDPS ordered Europol in January to delete data amassed unlawfully concerning individuals with no link to criminal activity, member states and the Commission came to the rescue with legal amendments enabling the agency to sidestep the order.
In May, Frontex and Europol put forward a proposal, drafted by a joint working group named ‘The Future Group’, for a new surveillance programme at the bloc’s external borders that would implement large-scale profiling of EU and third-country nationals using Artificial Intelligence.
▻https://balkaninsight.com/2022/07/07/eus-frontex-tripped-in-plan-for-intrusive-surveillance-of-migrants
#surveillance #migrations #asile #réfugiés #frontières #Frontex #données #Europol #PeDRA #Processing_of_Personal_Data_for_Risk_Analysis #Caniard #Hervé_Yves_Caniard #Leggeri #Fabrice_Leggeri #Nayra_Perez #Italie #Grèce #Espagne #Secondary_Security_Checks #données_personnelles
(#frontex)
New director, same tragedy
On Monday 4 July Frontex announced that its Management Board, made up of representatives of EU countries’ border authorities – mostly police officers active at national level -, has appointed #Aija_Kalnaja as Executive Director ad interim for the agency. This follows the resignation of former director Fabrice Leggeri in April 2022, amidst ongoing investigations by EU’s anti-fraud watchdog OLAF into Frontex‘s role concerning allegations of harassment, misconduct and illegal pushbacks. Kalnaja was already acting Executive Director since the departure of Leggeri.
The change in leadership is meant to appease the intense and growing criticism Frontex is facing. Over the past years – and thanks to the tireless work and testimonies from people on the move, support workers, journalists and civil society – the public has seen and been confronted with Frontex’s unacceptable behaviour and violent nature. The OLAF investigation is a direct result from this and its secret report on Frontex of February 2022 should be made public.
Pictures of wounded people after being attacked and beaten by border guards for attempting to cross a border; footage of boats purposefully being left adrift at sea, assistance being denied; minute-by-minute reconstructions of illegal pushbacks… The evidence is by now overwhelming and undeniable. And so the demands for change became unavoidable.
It is in this context that a new leader for the EU’s most powerful agency is being appointed. But appointing a new face while the structure and the system remain unaltered will not bring drastic and necessary change; it’s nothing but a new chapter of the same book, it’s continuation.
Frontex will remain Frontex – something that Kalnaja has evidenced herself. At the end of May Kalnaja told the European Parliament that Frontex is “traumatized” from all the criticism it received about the human rights violations it is responsible for.
This feeble attempt to put the agency and its employees in a victim role shows that Frontex lacks any recognition or repentence over the fact that it is not Frontex employees, but countless people on the move who suffer real trauma and injury from their treatment by the agency and other actors in the EU’s militarised border regime, nor that the violations are unacceptable and will stop in the future. It is also a clear signal from Frontex itself that we must expect business as usual under the leadership of the new Director.
And what #business_as_usual means is actually repeated and widespread forms of violence at and beyond Europe’s borders: people on the move being shot at, pushed back, left to drown, handed over to torturers, jailed and deported. It means an agency with its doors widely open for the lobby of the military and security industry, cooperating with authoritarian regimes in non-EU-countries, and building its own paramilitary border police force.
The fact is, a change of leadership is a solution that flagrantly fails to match the extent and nature of the problem. Frontex is a border police force whose mere existence inherently creates and perpetuates violence and death; substituting one director for another isn’t aimed at ending this violence or even addressing it – it simply seeks to put someone new in charge who will keep it running smoothly. Meanwhile, the European Commission, the European Parliament and Member states’ governments have firmly stood on the side of Frontex and chosen to expand its powers even more.
We are certain Kalnaja will continue to try to give Frontex a more humanitarian face, talking about fundamental rights and about rebuilding trust. We are also certain these are nothing but hollow words and an act of windowdressing, as the sole mission of Frontex is to keep or get people on the move out of the EU. As such, Frontex cannot be reformed or turned into a kinder version of itself. It is and will remain the figurehead of the EU’s deadly militarised and racist border and migration policies and therefore must be abolished.
Abolish Frontex, a network of over 130 groups and organisations in and beyond the EU, can assure Kalnaja that there will never be any trust in her and the agency. As we continue to campaign and take action to ABOLISH FRONTEX and end the EU border regime, we look forward to making Kalnaja‘s mandate a brief one and the last of its kind, coming to an end amidst the ruins of an agency that has been dismantled to the ground.
▻https://abolishfrontex.org/blog/2022/07/05/new-director-same-tragedy
#Kalnaja #asile #migrations #réfugiés #frontières #contrôles_frontaliers
–—
sur la #démission de #Fabrice_Leggeri, voir ce fil de discussion :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/958737
Démission de Leggeri à la tête de Frontex
BREAKING OVERNIGHT: Frontex Director Fabrice Leggeri is quitting, POLITICO hears. The head of the EU border agency has tendered his resignation, several people in the know told us, with further details expected today. Frontex did not respond to a request for comment. Leggeri has led the agency, which has come under scrutiny for its alleged role in so-called pushbacks of migrants, since 2015. The development comes as the EU’s anti-fraud watchdog, #OLAF, is poised to present the full findings of its long-running probe into Frontex.
▻https://www.politico.eu/newsletter/brussels-playbook/trouble-at-frontex-ruble-roulette-jeppes-replacement
#Leggeri #Fabrice_Leggeri #Frontex #démission #frontières #migrations #réfugiés
Stronger Borders Trump Human Rights At Vilnius Migration Conference
The head of Europe’s border agency Frontex has called on the European Union to clarify the rules on managing its external border. At a meeting of EU minsters to address an emergent ‘crisis’ of irregular migration, Fabrice Leggeri, executive director of Frontex, emphasised balancing respect for human rights with the need to manage migration across Europe’s borders. Leggeri’s statements are however directly at odds with Frontex’s own practices, EU policy concerns and the tone of the meeting.
Leggeri made his comments as EU interior ministers met in Lithuania to discuss ways to better prevent irregular migrants from crossing into EU territory and clear up the rules on when they can be deported back to their home territories.
“We are trained to comply with fundamental rights,” said Leggeri to reporters outside the meeting. “We are aware that there is a right to have international protection. But on the other hand, there are also illegal behaviours and illegal crossings that are not in line with EU regulation.”
Frontex, and Leggeri specifically, have been repeatedly accused of disregarding the human rights of irregular migrants trying to make it to Europe. Multiple investigations by NGOs and news outlets attest to Frontex collaborating with EU member states to force would-be migrants back to sea, an illegal procedure which is highly dangerous.
Such ‘pushback’ practices, which have been linked to the deaths of thousands of people at sea, have led to calls for Leggeri to step down and Frontex’s powers to be curtailed. Leggeri also faced calls to resign over his failure to recruit ‘fundamental rights officers’ into Frontex, whose job would be to safeguard the human rights of migrants.
At the meeting in Vilnius, however, Leggeri seemed to suggest a lack of clarity in EU policy was the real issue: “The legal clarification is needed everywhere in the EU, to know what is possible and what is not.”
Some EU policy in recent years has indeed led to the abrogation of migrants’ right to protections. The decision to withdraw search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean, ostensibly as a way to increase deterrence factors (the logic being that if migrants think they will be rescued they would be more likely to embark on a perilous crossing), have been credibly linked to rising death tolls in and around Europe’s waters.
While many EU member states and individual MEPs have expressed concern over the EU neglecting the human rights of migrants, the dominant focus overall remains on reducing irregular migration. Irregular (commonly called ‘illegal’) crossings proved remarkably resilient during the pandemic in comparison to other migration flows. Frontex reported that in 2021 the number of irregular crossings was the highest since 2017. Amid this increase, and the perennial concern over a new ‘migrant crisis,’ the meeting of EU interior ministers in Lithuania emphasised stronger borders above other concerns.
“This conference needs to send the message that Europe’s hard land and sea borders are ready to protect them,” said Greek migration minister Notis Mitarachi outside the meeting. “Migration should take place through legal means, not through illegal entries and through smuggling networks.”
The loudest calls for action at the meeting, from interior ministers of member states such as Italy, Poland, and Greece, were to increase EU border enforcement and crack down on smugglers’ networks. European Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson appears receptive to those calls., Though Johansson deplored the alleged pushbacks, she herself affirmed the need to prevent migrants from reaching Europe. In particular, she emphasised policy to prevent people from embarking on perilous journeys to begin with: “We can’t wait until we have desperate migrants at our borders. We need to act sooner."
Such an aim would presumably be pursued through enhanced border externalisation programmes in partnership with sending countries, a tool the EU is well experienced with. Though Commissioner Johansson reiterated the “long-standing” position of the EU Commission, that funds should not be used to build more walls and fences on EU borders, this does not necessarily preclude funds being used to limit the mobility of people in other regions.
Johansson also emphasised the need for the EU to increase its capability to send rejected asylum seekers back where they came from. Migrant returns have indeed stalled during the pandemic, but in keeping with the Vilnius meetings’ emphasis on strong borders over human rights, the calls to send more people back comes at the expense of serious concerns about migrants’ rights, as EU deportations often subject people to mortal danger and destitution when they are returned.
▻https://www.forbes.com/sites/freylindsay/2022/01/22/stronger-borders-trump-human-rights-at-vilnius-migration-conference
#Frontex #frontières #asile #migrations #réfugiés #Europe #droits_fondamentaux #hypocrisie #Leggeri #Fabrice_Leggeri
]]>Friends of the Traffickers Italy’s Anti-Mafia Directorate and the “Dirty Campaign” to Criminalize Migration
Afana Dieudonne often says that he is not a superhero. That’s Dieudonne’s way of saying he’s done things he’s not proud of — just like anyone in his situation would, he says, in order to survive. From his home in Cameroon to Tunisia by air, then by car and foot into the desert, across the border into Libya, and onto a rubber boat in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, Dieudonne has done a lot of surviving.
In Libya, Dieudonne remembers when the smugglers managing the safe house would ask him for favors. Dieudonne spoke a little English and didn’t want trouble. He said the smugglers were often high and always armed. Sometimes, when asked, Dieudonne would distribute food and water among the other migrants. Other times, he would inform on those who didn’t follow orders. He remembers the traffickers forcing him to inflict violence on his peers. It was either them or him, he reasoned.
On September 30, 2014, the smugglers pushed Dieudonne and 91 others out to sea aboard a rubber boat. Buzzing through the pitch-black night, the group watched lights on the Libyan coast fade into darkness. After a day at sea, the overcrowded dinghy began taking on water. Its passengers were rescued by an NGO vessel and transferred to an Italian coast guard ship, where officers picked Dieudonne out of a crowd and led him into a room for questioning.
At first, Dieudonne remembers the questioning to be quick, almost routine. His name, his age, his nationality. And then the questions turned: The officers said they wanted to know how the trafficking worked in Libya so they could arrest the people involved. They wanted to know who had driven the rubber boat and who had held the navigation compass.
“So I explained everything to them, and I also showed who the ‘captain’ was — captain in quotes, because there is no captain,” said Dieudonne. The real traffickers stay in Libya, he added. “Even those who find themselves to be captains, they don’t do it by choice.”
For the smugglers, Dieudonne explained, “we are the customers, and we are the goods.”
For years, efforts by the Italian government and the European Union to address migration in the central Mediterranean have focused on the people in Libya — interchangeably called facilitators, smugglers, traffickers, or militia members, depending on which agency you’re speaking to — whose livelihoods come from helping others cross irregularly into Europe. People pay them a fare to organize a journey so dangerous it has taken tens of thousands of lives.
The European effort to dismantle these smuggling networks has been driven by an unlikely actor: the Italian anti-mafia and anti-terrorism directorate, a niche police office in Rome that gained respect in the 1990s and early 2000s for dismantling large parts of the Mafia in Sicily and elsewhere in Italy. According to previously unpublished internal documents, the office — called the Direzione nazionale antimafia e antiterrorismo, or DNAA, in Italian — took a front-and-center role in the management of Europe’s southern sea borders, in direct coordination with the EU border agency Frontex and European military missions operating off the Libyan coast.
In 2013, under the leadership of a longtime anti-mafia prosecutor named Franco Roberti, the directorate pioneered a strategy that was unique — or at least new for the border officers involved. They would start handling irregular migration to Europe like they had handled the mob. The approach would allow Italian and European police, coast guard agencies, and navies, obliged by international law to rescue stranded refugees at sea, to at least get some arrests and convictions along the way.
The idea was to arrest low-level operators and use coercion and plea deals to get them to flip on their superiors. That way, the reasoning went, police investigators could work their way up the food chain and eventually dismantle the smuggling rings in Libya. With every boat that disembarked in Italy, police would make a handful of arrests. Anybody found to have played an active role during the crossing, from piloting to holding a compass to distributing water or bailing out a leak, could be arrested under a new legal directive written by Roberti’s anti-mafia directorate. Charges ranged from simple smuggling to transnational criminal conspiracy and — if people asphyxiated below deck or drowned when a boat capsized — even murder. Judicial sources estimate the number of people arrested since 2013 to be in the thousands.
For the police, prosecutors, and politicians involved, the arrests were an important domestic political win. At the time, public opinion in Italy was turning against migration, and the mugshots of alleged smugglers regularly held space on front pages throughout the country.
But according to the minutes of closed-door conversations among some of the very same actors directing these cases, which were obtained by The Intercept under Italy’s freedom of information law, most anti-mafia prosecutions only focused on low-level boat drivers, often migrants who had themselves paid for the trip across. Few, if any, smuggling bosses were ever convicted. Documents of over a dozen trials reviewed by The Intercept show prosecutions built on hasty investigations and coercive interrogations.
In the years that followed, the anti-mafia directorate went to great lengths to keep the arrests coming. According to the internal documents, the office coordinated a series of criminal investigations into the civilian rescue NGOs working to save lives in the Mediterranean, accusing them of hampering police work. It also oversaw efforts to create and train a new coast guard in Libya, with full knowledge that some coast guard officers were colluding with the same smuggling networks that Italian and European leaders were supposed to be fighting.
Since its inception, the anti-mafia directorate has wielded unparalleled investigative tools and served as a bridge between politicians and the courts. The documents reveal in meticulous detail how the agency, alongside Italian and European officials, capitalized on those powers to crack down on alleged smugglers, most of whom they knew to be desperate people fleeing poverty and violence with limited resources to defend themselves in court.
Tragedy and Opportunity
The anti-mafia directorate was born in the early 1990s after a decade of escalating Mafia violence. By then, hundreds of prosecutors, politicians, journalists, and police officers had been shot, blown up, or kidnapped, and many more extorted by organized crime families operating in Italy and beyond.
In Palermo, the Sicilian capital, prosecutor Giovanni Falcone was a rising star in the Italian judiciary. Falcone had won unprecedented success with an approach to organized crime based on tracking financial flows, seizing assets, and centralizing evidence gathered by prosecutor’s offices across the island.
But as the Mafia expanded its reach into the rest of Europe, Falcone’s work proved insufficient.
In September 1990, a Mafia commando drove from Germany to Sicily to gun down a 37-year-old judge. Weeks later, at a police checkpoint in Naples, the Sicilian driver of a truck loaded with weapons, explosives, and drugs was found to be a resident of Germany. A month after the arrests, Falcone traveled to Germany to establish an information-sharing mechanism with authorities there. He brought along a younger colleague from Naples, Franco Roberti.
“We faced a stone wall,” recalled Roberti, still bitter three decades later. He spoke to us outside a cafe in a plum neighborhood in Naples. Seventy-three years old and speaking with the rasp of a lifelong smoker, Roberti described Italy’s Mafia problem in blunt language. He bemoaned a lack of international cooperation that, he said, continues to this day. “They claimed that there was no need to investigate there,” Roberti said, “that it was up to us to investigate Italians in Germany who were occasional mafiosi.”
As the prosecutors traveled back to Italy empty-handed, Roberti remembers Falcone telling him that they needed “a centralized national organ able to speak directly to foreign judicial authorities and coordinate investigations in Italy.”
“That is how the idea of the anti-mafia directorate was born,” Roberti said. The two began building what would become Italy’s first national anti-mafia force.
At the time, there was tough resistance to the project. Critics argued that Falcone and Roberti were creating “super-prosecutors” who would wield outsize powers over the courts, while also being subject to political pressures from the government in Rome. It was, they argued, a marriage of police and the judiciary, political interests and supposedly apolitical courts — convenient for getting Mafia convictions but dangerous for Italian democracy.
Still, in January 1992, the project was approved in Parliament. But Falcone would never get to lead it: Months later, a bomb set by the Mafia killed him, his wife, and the three agents escorting them. The attack put to rest any remaining criticism of Falcone’s plan.
The anti-mafia directorate went on to become one of Italy’s most important institutions, the national authority over all matters concerning organized crime and the agency responsible for partially freeing the country from its century-old crucible. In the decades after Falcone’s death, the directorate did what many in Italy thought impossible, dismantling large parts of the five main Italian crime families and almost halving the Mafia-related murder rate.
And yet, by the time Roberti took control in 2013, it had been years since the last high-profile Mafia prosecution, and the organization’s influence was waning. At the same time, Italy was facing unprecedented numbers of migrants arriving by boat. Roberti had an idea: The anti-mafia directorate would start working on what he saw as a different kind of mafia. The organization set its sights on Libya.
“We thought we had to do something more coordinated to combat this trafficking,” Roberti remembered, “so I put everyone around a table.”
“The main objective was to save lives, seize ships, and capture smugglers,” Roberti said. “Which we did.”
Our Sea
Dieudonne made it to the Libyan port city of Zuwara in August 2014. One more step across the Mediterranean, and he’d be in Europe. The smugglers he paid to get him across the sea took all of his possessions and put him in an abandoned building that served as a safe house to wait for his turn.
Dieudonne told his story from a small office in Bari, Italy, where he runs a cooperative that helps recent arrivals access local education. Dieudonne is fiery and charismatic. He is constantly moving: speaking, texting, calling, gesticulating. Every time he makes a point, he raps his knuckles on the table in a one-two pattern. Dieudonne insisted that we publish his real name. Others who made the journey more recently — still pending decisions on their residence permits or refugee status — were less willing to speak openly.
Dieudonne remembers the safe house in Zuwara as a string of constant violence. The smugglers would come once a day to leave food. Every day, they would ask who hadn’t followed their orders. Those inside the abandoned building knew they were less likely to be discovered by police or rival smugglers, but at the same time, they were not free to leave.
“They’ve put a guy in the refrigerator in front of all of us, to show how the next one who misbehaves will be treated,” Dieudonne remembered, indignant. He witnessed torture, shootings, rape. “The first time you see it, it hurts you. The second time it hurts you less. The third time,” he said with a shrug, “it becomes normal. Because that’s the only way to survive.”
“That’s why arresting the person who pilots a boat and treating them like a trafficker makes me laugh,” Dieudonne said. Others who have made the journey to Italy report having been forced to drive at gunpoint. “You only do it to be sure you don’t die there,” he said.
Two years after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi’s government, much of Libya’s northwest coast had become a staging ground for smugglers who organized sea crossings to Europe in large wooden fishing boats. When those ships — overcrowded, underpowered, and piloted by amateurs — inevitably capsized, the deaths were counted by the hundreds.
In October 2013, two shipwrecks off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa took over 400 lives, sparking public outcry across Europe. In response, the Italian state mobilized two plans, one public and the other private.
“There was a big shock when the Lampedusa tragedy happened,” remembered Italian Sen. Emma Bonino, then the country’s foreign minister. The prime minister “called an emergency meeting, and we decided to immediately launch this rescue program,” Bonino said. “Someone wanted to call the program ‘safe seas.’ I said no, not safe, because it’s sure we’ll have other tragedies. So let’s call it Mare Nostrum.”
Mare Nostrum — “our sea” in Latin — was a rescue mission in international waters off the coast of Libya that ran for one year and rescued more than 150,000 people. The operation also brought Italian ships, airplanes, and submarines closer than ever to Libyan shores. Roberti, just two months into his job as head of the anti-mafia directorate, saw an opportunity to extend the country’s judicial reach and inflict a lethal blow to smuggling rings in Libya.
Five days after the start of Mare Nostrum, Roberti launched the private plan: a series of coordination meetings among the highest echelons of the Italian police, navy, coast guard, and judiciary. Under Roberti, these meetings would run for four years and eventually involve representatives from Frontex, Europol, an EU military operation, and even Libya.
The minutes of five of these meetings, which were presented by Roberti in a committee of the Italian Parliament and obtained by The Intercept, give an unprecedented behind-the-scenes look at the events on Europe’s southern borders since the Lampedusa shipwrecks.
In the first meeting, held in October 2013, Roberti told participants that the anti-mafia offices in the Sicilian city of Catania had developed an innovative way to deal with migrant smuggling. By treating Libyan smugglers like they had treated the Italian Mafia, prosecutors could claim jurisdiction over international waters far beyond Italy’s borders. That, Roberti said, meant they could lawfully board and seize vessels on the high seas, conduct investigations there, and use the evidence in court.
The Italian authorities have long recognized that, per international maritime law, they are obligated to rescue people fleeing Libya on overcrowded boats and transport them to a place of safety. As the number of people attempting the crossing increased, many Italian prosecutors and coast guard officials came to believe that smugglers were relying on these rescues to make their business model work; therefore, the anti-mafia reasoning went, anyone who acted as crew or made a distress call on a boat carrying migrants could be considered complicit in Libyan trafficking and subject to Italian jurisdiction. This new approach drew heavily from legal doctrines developed in the United States during the 1980s aimed at stopping drug smuggling.
European leaders were scrambling to find a solution to what they saw as a looming migration crisis. Italian officials thought they had the answer and publicly justified their decisions as a way to prevent future drownings.
But according to the minutes of the 2013 anti-mafia meeting, the new strategy predated the Lampedusa shipwrecks by at least a week. Sicilian prosecutors had already written the plan to crack down on migration across the Mediterranean but lacked both the tools and public will to put it into action. Following the Lampedusa tragedy and the creation of Mare Nostrum, they suddenly had both.
State of Necessity
In the international waters off the coast of Libya, Dieudonne and 91 others were rescued by a European NGO called Migrant Offshore Aid Station. They spent two days aboard MOAS’s ship before being transferred to an Italian coast guard ship, Nave Dattilo, to be taken to Europe.
Aboard the Dattilo, coast guard officers asked Dieudonne why he had left his home in Cameroon. He remembers them showing him a photograph of the rubber boat taken from the air. “They asked me who was driving, the roles and everything,” he remembered. “Then they asked me if I could tell him how the trafficking in Libya works, and then, they said, they would give me residence documents.”
Dieudonne said that he was reluctant to cooperate at first. He didn’t want to accuse any of his peers, but he was also concerned that he could become a suspect. After all, he had helped the driver at points throughout the voyage.
“I thought that if I didn’t cooperate, they might hurt me,” Dieudonne said. “Not physically hurt, but they could consider me dishonest, like someone who was part of the trafficking.”
To this day, Dieudonne says he can’t understand why Italy would punish people for fleeing poverty and political violence in West Africa. He rattled off a list of events from the last year alone: draught, famine, corruption, armed gunmen, attacks on schools. “And you try to convict someone for managing to escape that situation?”
The coast guard ship disembarked in Vibo Valentia, a city in the Italian region of Calabria. During disembarkation, a local police officer explained to a journalist that they had arrested five people. The journalist asked how the police had identified the accused.
“A lot has been done by the coast guard, who picked [the migrants] up two days ago and managed to spot [the alleged smugglers],” the officer explained. “Then we have witness statements and videos.”
Cases like these, where arrests are made on the basis of photo or video evidence and statements by witnesses like Dieudonne, are common, said Gigi Modica, a judge in Sicily who has heard many immigration and asylum cases. “It’s usually the same story. They take three or four people, no more. They ask them two questions: who was driving the boat, and who was holding the compass,” Modica explained. “That’s it — they get the names and don’t care about the rest.”
Modica was one of the first judges in Italy to acquit people charged for driving rubber boats — known as “scafisti,” or boat drivers, in Italian — on the grounds that they had been forced to do so. These “state of necessity” rulings have since become increasingly common. Modica rattled off a list of irregularities he’s seen in such cases: systemic racism, witness statements that migrants later say they didn’t make, interrogations with no translator or lawyer, and in some cases, people who report being encouraged by police to sign documents renouncing their right to apply for asylum.
“So often these alleged smugglers — scafisti — are normal people who were compelled to pilot a boat by smugglers in Libya,” Modica said.
Documents of over a dozen trials reviewed by The Intercept show prosecutions largely built on testimony from migrants who are promised a residence permit in exchange for their collaboration. At sea, witnesses are interviewed by the police hours after their rescue, often still in a state of shock after surviving a shipwreck.
In many cases, identical statements, typos included, are attributed to several witnesses and copied and pasted across different police reports. Sometimes, these reports have been enough to secure decadeslong sentences. Other times, under cross-examination in court, witnesses have contradicted the statements recorded by police or denied giving any testimony at all.
As early as 2015, attendees of the anti-mafia meetings were discussing problems with these prosecutions. In a meeting that February, Giovanni Salvi, then the prosecutor of Catania, acknowledged that smugglers often abandoned migrant boats in international waters. Still, Italian police were steaming ahead with the prosecutions of those left on board.
These prosecutions were so important that in some cases, the Italian coast guard decided to delay rescue when boats were in distress in order to “allow for the arrival of institutional ships that can conduct arrests,” a coast guard commander explained at the meeting.
When asked about the commander’s comments, the Italian coast guard said that “on no occasion” has the agency ever delayed a rescue operation. Delaying rescue for any reason goes against international and Italian law, and according to various human rights lawyers in Europe, could give rise to criminal liability.
NGOs in the Crosshairs
Italy canceled Mare Nostrum after one year, citing budget constraints and a lack of European collaboration. In its wake, the EU set up two new operations, one via Frontex and the other a military effort called Operation Sophia. These operations focused not on humanitarian rescue but on border security and people smuggling from Libya. Beginning in 2015, representatives from Frontex and Operation Sophia were included in the anti-mafia directorate meetings, where Italian prosecutors ensured that both abided by the new investigative strategy.
Key to these investigations were photos from the rescues, like the aerial image that Dieudonne remembers the Italian coast guard showing him, which gave police another way to identify who piloted the boats and helped navigate.
In the absence of government rescue ships, a fleet of civilian NGO vessels began taking on a large number of rescues in the international waters off the coast of Libya. These ships, while coordinated by the Italian coast guard rescue center in Rome, made evidence-gathering difficult for prosecutors and judicial police. According to the anti-mafia meeting minutes, some NGOs, including MOAS, routinely gave photos to Italian police and Frontex. Others refused, arguing that providing evidence for investigations into the people they saved would undermine their efficacy and neutrality.
In the years following Mare Nostrum, the NGO fleet would come to account for more than one-third of all rescues in the central Mediterranean, according to estimates by Operation Sophia. A leaked status report from the operation noted that because NGOs did not collect information from rescued migrants for police, “information essential to enhance the understanding of the smuggling business model is not acquired.”
In a subsequent anti-mafia meeting, six prosecutors echoed this concern. NGO rescues meant that police couldn’t interview migrants at sea, they said, and cases were getting thrown out for lack of evidence. A coast guard admiral explained the importance of conducting interviews just after a rescue, when “a moment of empathy has been established.”
“It is not possible to carry out this task if the rescue intervention is carried out by ships of the NGOs,” the admiral told the group.
The NGOs were causing problems for the DNAA strategy. At the meetings, Italian prosecutors and representatives from the coast guard, navy, and Interior Ministry discussed what they could do to rein in the humanitarian organizations. At the same time, various prosecutors were separately fixing their investigative sights on the NGOs themselves.
In late 2016, an internal report from Frontex — later published in full by The Intercept — accused an NGO vessel of directly receiving migrants from Libyan smugglers, attributing the information to “Italian authorities.” The claim was contradicted by video evidence and the ship’s crew.
Months later, Carmelo Zuccaro, the prosecutor of Catania, made public that he was investigating rescue NGOs. “Together with Frontex and the navy, we are trying to monitor all these NGOs that have shown that they have great financial resources,” Zuccaro told an Italian newspaper. The claim went viral in Italian and European media. “Friends of the traffickers” and “migrant taxi service” became common slurs used toward humanitarian NGOs by anti-immigration politicians and the Italian far right.
Zuccaro would eventually walk back his claims, telling a parliamentary committee that he was working off a hypothesis at the time and had no evidence to back it up.
In an interview with a German newspaper in February 2017, the director of Frontex, Fabrice Leggeri, refrained from explicitly criticizing the work of rescue NGOs but did say they were hampering police investigations in the Mediterranean. As aid organizations assumed a larger percentage of rescues, Leggeri said, “it is becoming more difficult for the European security authorities to find out more about the smuggling networks through interviews with migrants.”
“That smear campaign was very, very deep,” remembered Bonino, the former foreign minister. Referring to Marco Minniti, Italy’s interior minister at the time, she added, “I was trying to push Minniti not to be so obsessed with people coming, but to make a policy of integration in Italy. But he only focused on Libya and smuggling and criminalizing NGOs with the help of prosecutors.”
Bonino explained that the action against NGOs was part of a larger plan to change European policy in the central Mediterranean. The first step was the shift away from humanitarian rescue and toward border security and smuggling. The second step “was blaming the NGOs or arresting them, a sort of dirty campaign against them,” she said. “The results of which after so many years have been no convictions, no penalties, no trials.”
Finally, the third step was to build a new coast guard in Libya to do what the Europeans couldn’t, per international law: intercept people at sea and bring them back to Libya, the country from which they had just fled.
At first, leaders at Frontex were cautious. “From Frontex’s point of view, we look at Libya with concern; there is no stable state there,” Leggeri said in the 2017 interview. “We are now helping to train 60 officers for a possible future Libyan coast guard. But this is at best a beginning.”
Bonino saw this effort differently. “They started providing support for their so-called coast guard,” she said, “which were the same traffickers changing coats.”
Rescued migrants disembarking from a Libyan coast guard ship in the town of Khoms, a town 120 kilometres (75 miles) east of the capital on October 1, 2019.
Same Uniforms, Same Ships
Safe on land in Italy, Dieudonne was never called to testify in court. He hopes that none of his peers ended up in prison but said he would gladly testify against the traffickers if called. Aboard the coast guard ship, he remembers, “I gave the police contact information for the traffickers, I gave them names.”
The smuggling operations in Libya happened out in the open, but Italian police could only go as far as international waters. Leaked documents from Operation Sophia describe years of efforts by European officials to get Libyan police to arrest smugglers. Behind closed doors, top Italian and EU officials admitted that these same smugglers were intertwined with the new Libyan coast guard that Europe was creating and that working with them would likely go against international law.
As early as 2015, multiple officials at the anti-mafia meetings noted that some smugglers were uncomfortably close to members of the Libyan government. “Militias use the same uniforms and the same ships as the Libyan coast guard that the Italian navy itself is training,” Rear Adm. Enrico Credendino, then in charge of Operation Sophia, said in 2017. The head of the Libyan coast guard and the Libyan minister of defense, both allies of the Italian government, Credendino added, “have close relationships with some militia bosses.”
One of the Libyan coast guard officers playing both sides was Abd al-Rahman Milad, also known as Bija. In 2019, the Italian newspaper Avvenire revealed that Bija participated in a May 2017 meeting in Sicily, alongside Italian border police and intelligence officials, that was aimed at stemming migration from Libya. A month later, he was condemned by the U.N. Security Council for his role as a top member of a powerful trafficking militia in the coastal town of Zawiya, and for, as the U.N. put it, “sinking migrant boats using firearms.”
According to leaked documents from Operation Sophia, coast guard officers under Bija’s command were trained by the EU between 2016 and 2018.
While the Italian government was prosecuting supposed smugglers in Italy, they were also working with people they knew to be smugglers in Libya. Minniti, Italy’s then-interior minister, justified the deals his government was making in Libya by saying that the prospect of mass migration from Africa made him “fear for the well-being of Italian democracy.”
In one of the 2017 anti-mafia meetings, a representative of the Interior Ministry, Vittorio Pisani, outlined in clear terms a plan that provided for the direct coordination of the new Libyan coast guard. They would create “an operation room in Libya for the exchange of information with the Interior Ministry,” Pisani explained, “mainly on the position of NGO ships and their rescue operations, in order to employ the Libyan coast guard in its national waters.”
And with that, the third step of the plan was set in motion. At the end of the meeting, Roberti suggested that the group invite representatives from the Libyan police to their next meeting. In an interview with The Intercept, Roberti confirmed that Libyan representatives attended at least two anti-mafia meetings and that he himself met Bija at a meeting in Libya, one month after the U.N. Security Council report was published. The following year, the Security Council committee on Libya sanctioned Bija, freezing his assets and banning him from international travel.
“We needed to have the participation of Libyan institutions. But they did nothing, because they were taking money from the traffickers,” Roberti told us from the cafe in Naples. “They themselves were the traffickers.”
A Place of Safety
Roberti retired from the anti-mafia directorate in 2017. He said that under his leadership, the organization was able to create a basis for handling migration throughout Europe. Still, Roberti admits that his expansion of the DNAA into migration issues has had mixed results. Like his trip to Germany in the ’90s with Giovanni Falcone, Roberti said the anti-mafia strategy faltered because of a lack of collaboration: with the NGOs, with other European governments, and with Libya.
“On a European level, the cooperation does not work,” Roberti said. Regarding Libya, he added, “We tried — I believe it was right, the agreements [the government] made. But it turned out to be a failure in the end.”
The DNAA has since expanded its operations. Between 2017 and 2019, the Italian government passed two bills that put the anti-mafia directorate in charge of virtually all illegal immigration matters. Since 2017, five Sicilian prosecutors, all of whom attended at least one anti-mafia coordination meeting, have initiated 15 separate legal proceedings against humanitarian NGO workers. So far there have been no convictions: Three cases have been thrown out in court, and the rest are ongoing.
Earlier this month, news broke that Sicilian prosecutors had wiretapped journalists and human rights lawyers as part of one of these investigations, listening in on legally protected conversations with sources and clients. The Italian justice ministry has opened an investigation into the incident, which could amount to criminal behavior, according to Italian legal experts. The prosecutor who approved the wiretaps attended at least one DNAA coordination meeting, where investigations against NGOs were discussed at length.
As the DNAA has extended its reach, key actors from the anti-mafia coordination meetings have risen through the ranks of Italian and European institutions. One prosecutor, Federico Cafiero de Raho, now runs the anti-mafia directorate. Salvi, the former prosecutor of Catania, is the equivalent of Italy’s attorney general. Pisani, the former Interior Ministry representative, is deputy head of the Italian intelligence services. And Roberti is a member of the European Parliament.
Cafiero de Raho stands by the investigations and arrests that the anti-mafia directorate has made over the years. He said the coordination meetings were an essential tool for prosecutors and police during difficult times.
When asked about his specific comments during the meetings — particularly statements that humanitarian NGOs needed to be regulated and multiple admissions that members of the new Libyan coast guard were involved in smuggling activities — Cafiero de Raho said that his remarks should be placed in context, a time when Italy and the EU were working to build a coast guard in a part of Libya that was largely ruled by local militias. He said his ultimate goal was what, in the DNAA coordination meetings, he called the “extrajudicial solution”: attempts to prove the existence of crimes against humanity in Libya so that “the United Nation sends troops to Libya to dismantle migrants camps set up by traffickers … and retake control of that territory.”
A spokesperson for the EU’s foreign policy arm, which ran Operation Sophia, refused to directly address evidence that leaders of the European military operation knew that parts of the new Libyan coast guard were also involved in smuggling activities, only noting that Bija himself wasn’t trained by the EU. A Frontex spokesperson stated that the agency “was not involved in the selection of officers to be trained.”
In 2019, the European migration strategy changed again. Now, the vast majority of departures are intercepted by the Libyan coast guard and brought back to Libya. In March of that year, Operation Sophia removed all of its ships from the rescue area and has since focused on using aerial patrols to direct and coordinate the Libyan coast guard. Human rights lawyers in Europe have filed six legal actions against Italy and the EU as a result, calling the practice refoulement by proxy: facilitating the return of migrants to dangerous circumstances in violation of international law.
Indeed, throughout four years of coordination meetings, Italy and the EU were admitting privately that returning people to Libya would be illegal. “Fundamental human rights violations in Libya make it impossible to push migrants back to the Libyan coast,” Pisani explained in 2015. Two years later, he outlined the beginnings of a plan that would do exactly that.
The Result of Mere Chance
Dieudonne knows he was lucky. The line that separates suspect and victim can be entirely up to police officers’ first impressions in the minutes or hours following a rescue. According to police reports used in prosecutions, physical attributes like having “a clearer skin tone” or behavior aboard the ship, including scrutinizing police movements “with strange interest,” were enough to rouse suspicion.
In a 2019 ruling that acquitted seven alleged smugglers after three years of pretrial detention, judges wrote that “the selection of the suspects on one side, and the witnesses on the other, with the only exception of the driver, has almost been the result of mere chance.”
Carrying out work for their Libyan captors has cost other migrants in Italy lengthy prison sentences. In September 2019, a 22-year-old Guinean nicknamed Suarez was arrested upon his arrival to Italy. Four witnesses told police he had collaborated with prison guards in Zawiya, at the immigrant detention center managed by the infamous Bija.
“Suarez was also a prisoner, who then took on a job,” one of the witnesses told the court. Handing out meals or taking care of security is what those who can’t afford to pay their ransom often do in order to get out, explained another. “Unfortunately, you would have to be there to understand the situation,” the first witness said. Suarez was sentenced to 20 years in prison, recently reduced to 12 years on appeal.
Dieudonne remembered his journey at sea vividly, but with surprising cool. When the boat began taking on water, he tried to help. “One must give help where it is needed.” At his office in Bari, Dieudonne bent over and moved his arms in a low scooping motion, like he was bailing water out of a boat.
“Should they condemn me too?” he asked. He finds it ironic that it was the Libyans who eventually arrested Bija on human trafficking charges this past October. The Italians and Europeans, he said with a laugh, were too busy working with the corrupt coast guard commander. (In April, Bija was released from prison after a Libyan court absolved him of all charges. He was promoted within the coast guard and put back on the job.)
Dieudonne thinks often about the people he identified aboard the coast guard ship in the middle of the sea. “I told the police the truth. But if that collaboration ends with the conviction of an innocent person, it’s not good,” he said. “Because I know that person did nothing. On the contrary, he saved our lives by driving that raft.”
▻https://theintercept.com/2021/04/30/italy-anti-mafia-migrant-rescue-smuggling
#Méditerranée #Italie #Libye #ONG #criminalisation_de_la_solidarité #solidarité #secours #mer_Méditerranée #asile #migrations #réfugiés #violence #passeurs #Méditerranée_centrale #anti-mafia #anti-terrorisme #Direzione_nazionale_antimafia_e_antiterrorismo #DNAA #Frontex #Franco_Roberti #justice #politique #Zuwara #torture #viol #Mare_Nostrum #Europol #eaux_internationales #droit_de_la_mer #droit_maritime #juridiction_italienne #arrestations #Gigi_Modica #scafista #scafisti #état_de_nécessité #Giovanni_Salvi #NGO #Operation_Sophia #MOAS #DNA #Carmelo_Zuccaro #Zuccaro #Fabrice_Leggeri #Leggeri #Marco_Minniti #Minniti #campagne #gardes-côtes_libyens #milices #Enrico_Credendino #Abd_al-Rahman_Milad #Bija ##Abdurhaman_al-Milad #Al_Bija #Zawiya #Vittorio_Pisani #Federico_Cafiero_de_Raho #solution_extrajudiciaire #pull-back #refoulement_by_proxy #refoulement #push-back #Suarez
The #Frontex_files
#Glock, #Airbus, #Heckler_&_Koch. Die Teilnehmerliste der 16 Lobby-Treffen der EU-Grenzschutzagentur Frontex in den Jahren 2017 bis 2019 liest sich wie das Who-is-Who der Rüstungsindustrie. Kataloge mit Handfeuerwaffen wurden herumgereicht und in bunten PowerPoint-Präsentationen die Vorzüge von Überwachungsdrohnen erklärt.
Externe Beobachter*innen gab es bei den Treffen nicht. Und Frontex hat die Inhalte dieser Treffen nicht öffentlich zugänglich gemacht. Ein Lobby-Transparenzregister, wie es EU-Parlamentarier*innen vor zwei Jahren gefordert haben, hat Frontex bis heute nicht veröffentlicht. Auf Anfrage des ZDF Magazin Royale schrieb die EU-Agentur Ende Januar:
»Frontex trifft sich nicht mit Lobbyisten.«
Weil Frontex seiner Verantwortung als EU-Agentur nicht gerecht wird, hat das ZDF Magazin Royale diese Aufgabe übernommen. Hiermit veröffentlichen wir die FRONTEX FILES. Das erste Lobby-Transparenzregister der Grenzschutzagentur Frontex.
Was haben wir gemacht?
Gemeinsam mit den Rechercheurinnen Luisa Izuzquiza, Margarida Silva and Myriam Douo sowie der NGO „Frag den Staat“ hat das ZDF Magazin Royale 142 Dokumente von 16 Industry-Meetings, die Frontex zwischen 2017 und 2019 veranstaltet hat, ausgewertet. Darunter Programme, Teilnehmer*innenlisten, Powerpoint-Präsentationen und Werbekataloge.
Wie sind wir an die Dokumente gekommen?
Die Dokumente haben wir durch Anfragen nach dem Informationsfreiheitsgesetz der Europäischen Union erhalten.
Was ist besonders und neu daran?
Frontex hat die Einladungen zu den Treffen bisher nur teilweise auf der Webseite veröffentlicht. Wer dazu eingeladen war und was dort präsentiert wurde, jedoch nicht.
Was sagt Frontex und was stimmt?
Auf die Frage eines EU-Parlamentsabgeordneten im Jahr 2018 antwortete Frontex:
»Frontex trifft sich nur mit Lobbyisten, die im Transparenzregister der EU registriert sind und veröffentlicht jährlich einen Überblick der Treffen auf der Website. 2017 gab es keine solcher Treffen.«
Das stimmt nicht. Allein 2017 hat Frontex vier Meetings mit Lobby-Vertreter*innen abgehalten. 58 Prozent der Teilnehmenden waren nicht im EU-Transparenzregister gelistet. In den Treffen 2018 und 2019 waren 72 Prozent (91 von 125) der Lobbyist*innen nicht registriert.
Auf Anfrage des ZDF Magazin Royale schreibt Frontex:
»Frontex trifft sich nicht mit Lobbyisten. Es lädt Firmenvertreter ein, um an den Industrie-Tagen der Agentur teilzunehmen, die Grenzschutz-Offiziellen helfen sollen, über neue Technologien und Innovationen in Bezug auf Grenzkontrolle zu lernen.«
Auch das ist falsch: Die Auswertung der Präsentationen und Kataloge zeigen, dass Unternehmen versucht haben, Einfluss auf die Politik der Agentur zu nehmen. Teilweise wurden Vorschläge bereits umgesetzt.
Wer war bei den Frontex-Lobbytreffen?
An den Treffen haben 138 Vertreter*innen privater Einrichtungen teilgenommen: 108 Vertreter*innen von Unternehmen, 10 Think Tanks, 15 Universitäten, eine Nichtregierungsorganisation.
Keine einzige Menschenrechtsorganisation war bei diesen Treffen dabei.
Neben Vertreter*innen von EU-Grenzschutzbehörden hat Frontex zu den Treffen auch Internationale Organisationen wie Interpol, Europol oder die OSZE eingeladen und Vertreter*innen aus Staaten, die für ihre brutale Grenzschutzpolitik bekannt sind: die australische Regierung, das Homeland Security Department der USA, das angolanische Innenministerium, Vertreter des General Directorate of Residency and Foreigners Affairs der Vereinigten Arabischen Emirate oder die belarussische Grenzschutzbehörde.
Welche Produkte wurden präsentiert?
In den teils themenspezifischen Treffen wurden unterschiedliche Gerätschaften präsentiert, die zur Verteidigung der EU-Außengrenzen dienen sollen. Dazu gehören Handfeuerwaffen, Munition und Überwachungsgeräte wie Sensoren, Drohnen, Kameras und Server für die Speicherung von biometrischen Daten. Die Produkte wurden in Powerpoint-Präsentationen vorgestellt.
Welche Produkte wurden präsentiert?
In den teils themenspezifischen Treffen wurden unterschiedliche Gerätschaften präsentiert, die zur Verteidigung der EU-Außengrenzen dienen sollen. Dazu gehören Handfeuerwaffen, Munition und Überwachungsgeräte wie Sensoren, Drohnen, Kameras und Server für die Speicherung von biometrischen Daten. Die Produkte wurden in Powerpoint-Präsentationen vorgestellt.
Wo kann ich mich weiter über das Thema informieren?
Die Rechercheurinnen Luisa Izuzquiza, Margarida Silva and Myriam Douo haben zu den Dokumenten einen ausführlichen Bericht geschrieben und bei Corporate Europe Observatory veröffentlicht. Hier geht es zu dem Bericht: ►https://corporateeurope.org/en/lobbying-fortress-europe
▻https://frontexfiles.eu
#mensonges #frontières #frontières_extérieures #Fabrice_Leggeri #Leggeri #droits_humains #push-backs #refoulements #droits_fondamentaux #complexe_militaro-industriel #lobby #ZDF #enquête #Frag_den_Staat #FragDenStaat
–—
European Border and Coast Guard: The Commission welcomes agreement on a standing corps of 10,000 border guards by 2027
Today, the Council green-lighted the political agreement reached last week to reinforce the European Border and Coast Guard, giving it the right level of ambition to respond to the common challenges Europe is facing in managing migration and borders.
The centre piece of the reinforced Agency will be a standing corps of 10,000 border guards – ready to support Member States at any time. The Agency will also have a stronger mandate on returns and will cooperate more closely with non-EU countries, including those beyond the EU’s immediate neighbourhood. Agreed in the record time of just over 6 months, the new European Border and Coast Guard represents a step-change in the EU’s ability to collectively better protect Europe’s external borders.
Welcoming the agreement, First Vice-President Frans Timmermans said: “In an area of free movement without internal border controls, strengthening and managing Europe’s external borders is a shared responsibility. I am glad to see that a 10,000-strong standing corps with the necessary equipment will help Member States to better protect our borders and our citizens. By working together constructively and swiftly, we can create a safer Europe.”
Commissioner for Home Affairs, Migration and Citizenship Dimitris Avramopoulos added: “From now onwards, the European Border and Coast Guard will have the full operational capacity and powers needed to effectively and fully support Member States on the ground, at all times. Better controlling our external borders, fighting irregular migration, carrying out returns and cooperating with third countries – we can only succeed if we do this together. Ultimately, this will also help preserve the long-term viability of the Schengen area of free movement.”
The Agency supports Member States and does not replace their responsibilities in external border management and return. The reinforced European Border and Coast Guard Agency will be equipped with more resources and capabilities including:
A standing corps of 10,000 border guards: A standing corps of 10,000 border guards will be set up by 2027 and will ensure that the Agency can support Member States whenever and wherever needed. The standing corps will bring together Agency staff as well as border guards and return experts seconded or deployed by Member States, who will support the over 100,000 national border guards in their tasks. In addition, the Agency will have a budget to acquire its own equipment, such as vessels, planes and vehicles.
Executive powers: The standing corps will be able to carry out border control and return tasks, such as identity checks, authorising entry at the external borders, and carrying out borders’ surveillance – only with the agreement of the host Member State.
More support on return: In addition to organising and financing joint return operations, the Agency will now also be able to support Member States at all stages of return process with Member States remaining responsible for taking return decisions. This support will include for example by identifying non-EU nationals with no right to stay or acquiring travel documents.
Stronger cooperation with non-EU countries: The Agency will be able – subject to prior agreement of the country concerned – to launch joint operations and deploy staff outside the EU, beyond countries neighbouring the EU, to provide support on border and migration management.
Antenna offices: The Agency will be able to set up antenna offices in Member States and in a non-EU country (subject to a status agreement) to support logistically its operational activities and guarantee the smooth running of the Agency’s operations.
Next steps
The European Parliament’s LIBE Committee still has to confirm the political agreement reached in trilogues on 28 March. Then both the European Parliament and the Council will have to formally adopt the Regulation. The text will then be published in the Official Journal of the European Union and the European Border and Coast Guard’s enhanced mandate will enter into force 20 days later. The new European Border and Coast Guard standing corps will be available for deployment starting from 2021, once it becomes fully operational and will reach its full capacity of 10,000 border guards by 2027.
Background
The European Border and Coast Guard was established in 2016, building on existing structures of Frontex, to meet the new challenges and political realities faced by the EU, both as regards migration and internal security. The reliance on voluntary Member States’ contributions of staff and equipment has however resulted in persistent gaps affecting the efficiency of the support the European Border and Coast Guard could offer to Member States.
In his 2018 State of the Union Address President Juncker announced that the Commission will reinforce the European Border and Coast Guard even further. The objective of this upgrade was to equip the Agency with a standing corps of 10,000 operational staff and with its own equipment to ensure that the EU has the necessary capabilities in place — constantly and reliably. On 28 March, the European Parliament and the Council reached a political agreement on the Commission’s proposal, which was confirmed by the Council.
▻http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-19-1929_en.htm
Après #Frontex, #Frontex_plus (►https://seenthis.net/tag/frontex_plus)
Après Frontex plus, #Frontex_plus_plus
#renvois #expulsions #frontières #contrôles_frontaliers #asile #migrations #réfugiés #externalisation #business
]]>Le directeur de #Frontex appelle à accélérer les #expulsions de migrants
Le directeur de l’agence européenne des garde-frontières et garde-côtes (Frontex) exhorte les Etats membres à appliquer plus systématiquement les décisions d’expulsions de migrants et à harmoniser leurs règles, sans quoi l’Europe envoie selon lui un encouragement « implicite » à traverser la Méditerranée.
Le directeur de l’agence européenne des garde-frontières et garde-côtes (Frontex) exhorte les Etats membres à appliquer plus systématiquement les décisions d’expulsions de migrants et à harmoniser leurs règles, sans quoi l’Europe envoie selon lui un encouragement « implicite » à traverser la Méditerranée.
Dans un entretien à paraître jeudi dans les quotidiens régionaux du groupe Ebra, Fabrice Leggeri appelle globalement les pays européens à durcir et à coordonner la gestion des frontières extérieures communes.
« Tant qu’on n’arrivera pas à augmenter l’efficacité des éloignements, les gens verront des clandestins créer dans certains quartiers une forme de société parallèle, fonctionnant sur une économie noire, comme des ’bulles’ où la loi ne s’applique pas », estime-t-il.
« Les Etats membres doivent prendre davantage de décisions effectives d’éloignement, qui soient mieux mises en oeuvre », dit-il.
En France , 18.000 expulsions ont eu lieu l’an dernier, dont près de 15.000 forcées (en hausse de 14% par rapport à 2016) et 86.000 personnes ont été refoulées aux frontières, pour la plupart dans les Alpes-Maritimes.
Lors d’un Conseil européen, les Vingt-Huit se sont engagés le 29 juin notamment à renforcer les frontières de l’UE et à créer des « plateformes de débarquement » hors d’Europe et des « centres contrôlés » d’accueil sur le sol européen.
Pour Fabrice Leggeri, les plateformes situées dans des pays tiers, décriées par les ONG et par l’Organisation internationale pour les migrations (OIM) comme contraires au droit d’asile, représentent une piste valable.
« Il n’est pas question de revenir sur le devoir de sauvetage des gens. La vraie question est : pour les débarquer où ? Pourquoi systématiquement en Europe ? Après, il n’est pas non plus question de refouler les gens vers des pays ’non sûrs’. L’enjeu est donc de mettre en place des plateformes de débarquement respectueuses du droit, qui permettent aux personnes d’avoir accès à l’asile », estime-t-il.
En vue de coordonner les expulsions par avion, l’agence Frontex est en train de mettre au point « un système informatique d’échange de données nommé Irma qui dira en temps réel combien d’irréguliers d’un pays, par exemple des Pakistanais, vont avoir bientôt une décision effective d’éloignement de l’Union, ce qui nous permettra de planifier l’envoi d’un charter vers le Pakistan », explique-t-il.
Selon l’OIM, 63.142 réfugiés ont traversé la Méditerranée cette année pour rejoindre l’Europe, soit environ deux fois moins qu’à la même période l’an dernier. Au moins 1.500 personnes ont péri dans cette traversée.
▻https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/220818/le-directeur-de-frontex-appelle-accelerer-les-expulsions-de-migrants
#asile #migrations #renvois #réfugiés #UE #Europe #EU
#machine_à_expulsion #machine_à_expulser = les tags que j’ai utilisés sur seenthis pour parler de cette envie d’expulser à tous les coup !
]]>The Future of the Schengen Area : Latest Developments and Challenges in the Schengen Governance Framework since 2016
This Study, commissioned by the European Parliament’s Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs at the request of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE-Committee), takes stock of the main developments that have occurred in the Schengen Governance Framework since 2016. It analyses the legitimacy of a number of States’ decisions to maintain internal border controls. Also, most recent policy proposals in the field of internal police checks are assessed in light of relevant EU legal standards. The paper also questions the legality of the border walls and fences, which have been recently erected at the EU external borders and within the Schengen area.
▻http://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document.html?reference=IPOL_STU(2018)604943
#Schengen (fin de -) #frontières #murs #barrières_frontalières #contrôles_frontaliers #contrôles_systématiques_aux_frontières #frontière_sud-alpine
#cartographie #visualisation
La fin de Schengen... en gros..
Lien vers l’étude (pdf) :
Source de la carte (c’est intéressant le fait qu’elle a été faite par le HCR) :
▻https://data2.unhcr.org/fr/documents/download/55249
Un texte écrit par le grand chef de #Frontex lui-même... #Fabrice_Leggeri, sur les #frontières, évidemment...
Safeguarding borders for an open Europe
Freedom of movement is a right enshrined in the European Union’s area of freedom, security and justice. But it is only by protecting the EU’s external borders that this freedom can continue to exist, writes Fabrice Leggeri.
At the same time, returning to the old system of checking passports and customs papers at every border within the EU would not only damage mutual trust but could do irreparable harm to our economies.
But even though a recent study by the European Parliament found that the indefinite suspension of the Schengen Area could cost up to €230 billion over a period of 10 years, the concept of the area of freedom, security and justice has taken a series of hard knocks over the last few years.
This was due in part to the influx of refugees that began with the deterioration of the situation in Syria. Then there were the terror attacks that have taken place on European soil with horrifying frequency have aroused fears for security, a topic that surveys show is high on the list of priorities of EU citizens.
In seeking remedies, we must not frame migration as a security problem. Indeed, conflating these issues would play into the hands of the very extremists we are struggling to defeat. However, we need stable borders, and for this, we need new and innovative European solutions.
The recent transformation of Frontex into the European Border and Coast Guard Agency is just such a solution. It allows us to move beyond our former focus on migration and migratory flows to safeguarding the security of the EU’s external borders, including the crucial fight against organised crime.
It is a tough task. But our increased budget and expanded mandate give us invaluable tools to assess weaknesses in the border control capabilities of member states and address them by making specific recommendations, such as modernising equipment, deploying additional officers to particular sections of the border, providing training to frontline practitioners, or in some places improving the reception and registration facilities for newly arrived migrants.
With a coastline of almost 66,000 km and land borders of more than 13,000 km, Europe is only as secure as its external borders. And on the basis of our own findings and analysis, we know there are indeed many dangers lurking, from the human traffickers through to the many tonnes of hard drugs and weapons seized with our help on their way into the EU.
That is why we now have more than 1,700 officers deployed at the EU’s external borders to assist member states. The new mandate has also allowed us to establish a large pool of officers committed by national authorities, who can be rapidly deployed in case of proven threats.
So Frontex is increasingly moving from a supporting role to coordinating and complementing the work of our partners in the member states, and this trend will strengthen further over the next decade.
However, we will still remain only one piece of the puzzle. Our colleagues in the European Commission and Parliament are another. And the many remaining pieces are made up of the national border and coast guards, the frontline workers at the EU’s borders and their brave colleagues out on the high seas. It is together with them, and only together, that Frontex forms the European border and coast guard.
Since its inception in 2004, Frontex has found itself the brunt of criticism, either that the agency is trying to create ‘Fortress Europe’, ignoring the needs of those fleeing war and persecution; or conversely, that it is not being tough enough on protecting the EU’s external borders.
Of concern to me is not so much that the errors at the root of this critique indicate a lack of understanding of our work, but – far more importantly – of the issues at stake.
For border security is not a matter of encouraging unfounded suspicions, or indiscriminately excluding those who need our help. In fact, it is quite the reverse.
By improving our risk analysis, intelligence sharing, and surveillance techniques, we ensure that the needs of people seeking international protection from war or persecution are met, while those who could endanger our security are detected and dealt with appropriately.
And strengthening our borders is not just about irregular migrants. Since March 2017, everybody crossing the EU’s external borders legally has been checked. And the EU is at an advanced stage of establishing a system similar to the one used in the US, to check that visitors from countries exempt from visa requirements do not pose a threat of any kind during their stay.
As Frontex continues to expand, there is nonetheless one thing that will not change. Rescuing people in danger is an essential part of our mandate wherever Frontex is active at the EU’s maritime borders.
Indeed, I would go so far as to say that respect for fundamental rights is an integral component of effective border management. The agency is bound by the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, and Frontex has advanced mechanisms for recording potential or alleged violations.
Finally, I must make the point that border management is not the answer to all Europe’s challenges, just as it is not an ersatz for migration policy. If we want to put an end to the drowning in the Mediterranean and the deaths in the Sahel, we need to work harder and cooperate more closely to eliminate the root causes of migration, from armed conflict through to famine.
At the same time (and as reiterated by the European Commission on numerous occasions), we need to offer those in need of international protection legal paths to enter the EU. This would not only save lives but also cut off financing for the criminal smuggling rings currently making a fortune out of the misery of their fellow humans.
So we are speaking here not just about migration or borders, but about the EU and our own future. Some people took the events of 2015 and the ongoing crisis to claim that the EU has failed as a project and belongs on the rubbish heap of history. I believe the opposite.
With the creation of the European Border and Coast Guard, the EU has embarked on a new stage of its journey. There is no single country that can safeguard its citizens from internationally organised crime, and at the same time meet its humanitarian obligations to assist those fleeing persecution.
If protecting our external borders and safeguarding free movement really matters to us, then it is time to speak out for Europe, and for the additional resources needed at the regional and national level to avoid a repeat of 2015. This would serve the interests not just of a few, but of everyone in the EU.
▻https://www.euractiv.com/section/justice-home-affairs/opinion/safeguarding-borders-for-an-open-europe
#frontières_extérieures #ouverture_des_frontières #fermeture_des_frontières #liberté_de_mouvement (mais que à l’intérieur de l’Europe c’est une bonne chose, nous suggère #Leggeri)
Je me suis permise de corriger son titre, sur twitter :
Wrong. Here is the correct version of your title, Mr @fabriceleggeri: “Opening #borders for safeguarding #Europe”
▻https://twitter.com/EURACTIV/status/970618491765231616
cc @isskein
Migranti, vertice al Viminale dei ministri dell’Interno di Italia, Ciad, Libia e Niger
Una cooperazione congiunta per il contrasto al terrorismo e alla tratta di esseri umani. Istituita una cabina di regia che opererà per monitorare sui temi oggetto dell’incontro
Dimitris #Avramopoulos : « Nos opérations en Méditerranée nous ont permis de sauver plus de 400 000 vies »
Déjà depuis 2015, les opérations conjointes sous l’égide de l’ancien Frontex (maintenant la nouvelle Agence européenne garde-frontières et de garde-côtes) en mer Egée et aux larges de l’Italie ont été étendues et ont permis de sauver plus de 400 000 vies.
▻https://www.letemps.ch/monde/2017/03/06/dimitris-avramopoulos-nos-operations-mediterranee-ont-permis-sauver-plus-400
#Frontex #sauvetage #le_monde_à_l'envers #mourir_en_mer #mourir_en_Méditerranée
Je rappelle quand même que le directeur de Frontex lui-même, Monsieur #Leggeri, avait déclaré au Guardian que :
"#Triton ne peut pas être une opération de recherche et sauvetage. Je veux dire, dans notre plan opérationnel, nous ne pouvons pas avoir les moyens pour une action de recherche et sauvetage. Ce n’est pas le mandat de Frontex, et, selon moi, ce n’est pas le mandat de l’Union européenne non plus".
►https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/22/eu-borders-chief-says-saving-migrants-lives-cannot-be-priority-for-patr
cc @reka
Private ships play big role in Europe’s migrant crisis
Two years ago, a small, privately-run ship set out to lend a hand to military operations in the Mediterranean rescuing migrants on boats near capsizing off Libya.
▻http://www.thelocal.it/20160806/small-aid-ships-play-big-role-in-europes-migrant-crisis
#privatisation #asile #migrations #secours #naufrages #mer #Méditerranée #mourir_en_mer #réfugiés #sauvetages #MOAS #SOS_Méditerranée #ONG #sauvetage
Le mérite de la clareté du directeur de Frontex :
EU summit to offer resettlement to only 5,000 refugees
“#Triton cannot be a search-and-rescue operation. I mean, in our operational plan, we cannot have provisions for proactive search-and-rescue action. This is not in Frontex’s mandate, and this is, in my understanding, not in the mandate of the European Union,” #Leggeri said. Instead, he appealed for planes to conduct aerial surveillance so they could anticipate more disasters.
▻http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/22/most-migrants-crossing-mediterranean-will-be-sent-back-eu-leaders-to-ag
#asile #migration #naufrage #Méditerranée #mourir_en_mer #réfugiés #Forteresse_Europe
#politique_migratoire #EU #Europe #sauvetage #Fabrice_Leggeri #Frontex