Migrant pushbacks at Europe’s external borders are an open secret. The border protection agency Frontex is also said to have participated in the practice. Now their boss Fabrice Leggeri is taking the consequences and resigning. For the Swiss critics of Frontex, this is a godsend.
Fabrice Leggeri at a meeting of EU interior ministers in December 2019.
Until recently, Fabrice Leggeri seemed to be firmly in the saddle. The director of Frontex routinely let critical questions roll off at his agency. Europe’s border protection agency pays strict attention to the protection of fundamental and human rights, the Frenchman has repeatedly asserted in hearings and interviews. Incidentally, it is not his people who are responsible for securing the EU’s external border, but national border guards.
Now the 54-year-old has thrown in the towel, as the online magazine “Politico” first reported on Friday. Leggeri is said to have made his decision on Thursday evening and informed the EU Commission about it after he had previously been heard by his agency’s board of directors on an investigation report by the anti-fraud authority Olaf.
lost support
The 200-page report has been secret until now. However, he is said to be a heavy burden on Leggeri and other officials at the top of Frontex. German MEP Erik Marquardt, who saw the summary of the report, says it shows Frontex management “to have known about human rights violations and deliberately avoided reporting them”.
Leggeri is not only accused of sharing knowledge about so-called pushbacks – which means the illegal pushing back of migrants across a national border without prior asylum examination. The director of the largest agency in the EU is also said to have bullied and harassed employees. At the end of 2020, Olaf’s investigators therefore searched the offices of Leggeri and his chief of cabinet Thibauld de La Haye Jousselin at Frontex’s Warsaw headquarters for the first time.
Specifically, employees from the fundamental rights unit, which is responsible for the internal control of operations, are said to have been intimidated. This suggests that, as critics believe, breaches of the law have been systematically swept under the carpet. However, the fact that the Frontex boss lost the backing of the board of directors has less to do with the practice of pushbacks than with these “mistakes” in his administration.
are on the board In addition to the Commission, the states of the Schengen area are also represented, and quite a few member countries support a hard line towards migrants in principle. This explains why Leggeri, who had become a red rag to many MEPs and refugee commissioner Ylva Johansson in particular, was able to stay afloat for so long. On Friday afternoon, however, the Frenchman preempted his dismissal with his resignation.
Highly armed
Leggeri has led Frontex since 2015. In that year of the refugee crisis, the agency, which originally only had the mandate to network the border guards of all Schengen countries, was expanded into an independent force. It should provide operational support to the Member States. However, the national authorities remained primarily responsible for controls on their sections of the external border. So while Frontex on the one hand expanded rapidly and acquired planes, boats, drones and other high-tech equipment, on the other hand the EU states continued to do what they considered necessary to prevent illegal migration.
Frontex’s budget was just 6 million euros when it was founded in 2005. It is 754 million euros 17 years later. Under Leggeri’s leadership, has the agency been helpful in reducing migration numbers – which some in the EU see as its most important task? Or did Frontex help normalize pushbacks because of their complicity, as others fear?
In fact, pushbacks on Europe’s external borders have long been part of the reality, with which many governments can apparently live well. In 2020, the European Court of Human Rights also ruled that refusal of entry does not necessarily mean refoulement when illegal means are used on the way to crossing the border.
Since 2020, several reports of human rights violations against refugees at sea have become public. And although these allegations primarily concern the Greek Coast Guard, Frontex has been suspected of at least looking away, if not taking part. A network of European media has released research findings this week that migrants who have already made it to the Greek islands have been mistreated and pushed back into the open sea. EU officials are said to have watched.
Explosive point in time
Leggeri has always denied these allegations. In an interview with “Welt” last year he suggested not to speak of “pushbacks” in the Aegean, but of “situations at sea” in which boats had tried to evade border controls. The legal framework for intercepting boats therefore applies to them. Even after Leggeri’s resignation, the question of how to resolve this tension between border protection and the protection of fundamental rights is likely to remain an open question.
In any case, the step comes at an explosive time for Switzerland, because here on May 15 – for the first time in a member state of the Schengen Agreement – a vote is to be taken on an expansion of the agency. Bern is to transfer 61 million euros a year to Brussels by 2027 instead of the previous 24 million in order to support Frontex’s further expansion course. The opponents of the EU authority should see their criticism confirmed after the bad press for Leggeri. It remains questionable how things should be more humane at Europe’s borders without Frontex.