Frontex celebrates 20 years of rights violations with impunity

The European coastguard and border guard agency turns 20 years old on this 26 October 2024 [1]. It’s a sad anniversary for an agency that has been widely blamed for decades for direct and indirect violations of the rights of people on the move [2]. An agency whose aim is to ‘protect’ Europe’s borders, with no regard for the lives and safety of those who try to cross them. An agency that is the symbol of a deadly border regime and the standard-bearer of repressive and ultra-secure migration policies, the dramatic consequences of which have been amply demonstrated.

Powerful, untouchable and indestructible, Frontex is not only still there 20 years on, but its activities have expanded massively [3]. Despite documented and filmed violations of rights [4], despite pernicious collaboration with failed [5] or authoritarian regimes [6], despite internal malfunctions [7], despite the relentless efforts of civil society to shed light on its culpable actions and abuses [8], and despite - more recently - increased vigilance on the part of the European institutions [9].

20 years on, in spite of countless damning pieces of evidence of its compromise, complicity or complacency in numerous abuses in the name of the fight against immigration, despite the departure in 2022 of its controversial resigning Director [10] - who has since joined the ranks of the French far right as an MEP [11] - nothing has changed. Because nothing can stop Frontex, which cannot be controlled or held accountable, and whose structural impunity is, in fact, largely organised [12].

Frontex is unreformable, unassailable and irremovable. Its mandate is incompatible with respect for rights [13], but it was created to be unaccountable. The populist ideology underpinning migration policies has grown stronger in 20 years and has won out over respect for rights in a Europe that now openly flouts them. Not just by circumventing European law, but by freeing itself from it to codify violations of rights [14] and ‘legalise the illegal’ [15]. The bedrock of values and principles on which Europe was founded when it was created, and which it claimed to defend, is crumbling further every day, shrinking to nothing.

How much longer will we have to stand by as helpless observers of a European system that congratulates itself on its macabre performance in managing the Union’s external borders in defiance of the law, and that congratulates itself despite common sense and accumulated evidence of abuses [16]?

Let’s not wait any longer. It is high time to abolish Frontex.