The departure of Fabrice Leggeri as head of the European Border Surveillance Agency, otherwise known as Frontex, seemed inevitable. For several months, the sulphurous and disputed executive director of the agency has been in the crosshairs of several investigations, including one by the European Anti-Fraud Office (Olaf), for having carried out illegal pushbacks, and above all, to have concealed them. His former chief of staff, Thibauld de la Haye Jousselin, would also be in Olaf’s crosshairs.
This Thursday, Fabrice Leggeri finally submitted his resignation to the board of directors, a decision accepted on Friday morning. The conclusions of Olaf’s 200-page report have not yet been made public despite “the many proofs” that he accumulates, according to his director. Evidence that led Fabrice Leggeri to cast off and soon return to the French Ministry of the Interior.
deny the facts
According to point, the Olaf report singles out three grounds against the former director of Frontex: non-compliance with procedures, disloyalty towards the European Union and its institutions, as well as poor management of the agency’s teams . Between the lines, the report accuses the Agency of having engaged in “pushback” operations – illegal pushbacks of migrants in the Aegean Sea. Frontex would also have covered up the actions of the Greek authorities guilty of having repelled migrants who left Turkey to try to reach European shores. Fabrice Leggeri had until then ceased to deny any involvement. For its part, his agency tried in vain to prevent the Olaf investigators from presenting their results to the deputies of the European Parliament, who nevertheless control the actions of Frontex.
This is not the first time that Frontex has been accused of these illegal pushbacks of migrants. The consortium of journalists brought together under the aegis of Lighthouse Reports, a non-profit investigative media outlet, denounced for the first time, in March 2020, the complicity of a Frontex boat, a passive witness to a pushback in the Aegean Sea. . This first investigation had caused a serious crisis of governance within the European agency, without Fabrice Leggeri being particularly worried. In April 2021, this consortium – in which Release – highlights the role of European border guards, who warned the Libyan authorities of the presence of migrants off their country. In total, in 2020, 11,891 migrants were intercepted by the Libyan Coast Guard, sometimes based on information from Frontex.
They violated the principles of international, European and Greek law
On Wednesday, Lighthouse Reports reporters revealed in Der Spiegel and the world new facts during the period from March 2020 to September 2021. During these few months, Frontex agents contributed to pushing back hundreds, even thousands of migrants outside Europe, via the pushback technique. Except that they listed and recorded these operations, therefore illegal, under the term of “preventions at the start” in the agency’s Jora (Joint Operations Reporting Application) database. They not only minimized reality, but also violated the principles of international, European and Greek law. The investigation establishes that Frontex agents located, stopped the migrant boats, and knowingly left it to the Greek border guards to send them back to Turkey. At least 222 incidents are listed as “preventions at the start” but would in reality be linked to repressions.
“Leggeri is the facade”
Fabrice Leggeri had headed Frontex since 2015. Under his leadership, the humanitarian authority perceived as responsible for the rescue of migrants at sea and almost unknown to the general public, has become a gigantic police organization. Since the European migration crisis, which coincides with his arrival at the head of the agency, the number of border guards and coast guards has continued to increase and should reach 10,000 individuals by 2027. These are no longer civil servants sent by the Member States, but police civil servants recruited directly by Frontex. They wear a European uniform, as well as a weapon in the belt.
The departure of Fabrice Leggeri comes as the UN recalls on Friday that 3,000 migrants died at sea, on the way to Europe, in 2021. More specifically, 1,924 people died in the central and western Mediterranean, according to Shabia Mantoo, door -speaker of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). For Omer Shatz, legal director of the NGO Front-Lex, which initiated several proceedings against Frontex: “Leggeri should not have resigned. He should have been fired. Not now, but years ago […]. It was the obligation of the commissioner and of the management board of Frontex. No one can undo the countless lives lost and the scars of abuse suffered by abused people. Leggeri is the facade. But the problem remains within Frontex, the Commission and the Member States. They are the ones who orchestrate criminal border policies across the European Union. Leggeri was only corrupt enough to execute them.”