Filenews 20 November 2021
Frontex chief Fabrice Leggeri sees the issue of migrants at the border with Belarus as a hybrid threat and calls for clear EU red lines in migrant management, in an interview with German newspaper Welt.
Mr. Leggeri takes the view that the actions of the Belarusian regime on the border with Poland constitute an attack on the EU and underlines that the absence of a common EU line on migration has a negative impact on its external borders.
As he says, many member states want to install a fence on their borders, as Poland is currently doing or as Bulgaria has already done on the border with Turkey, but also Greece.
"If member states want to build a fence, then they can do it, Frontex is not in a position to comment on that," Mr. Kennedy said in the newspaper. Leggeri, who then points out that the President of Belarus, Lukashenko, has created an "artificial" movement of migrants at the Belarusian border with the EU, which constitutes a hybrid threat, a formulation that since February 2020 Greece has repeatedly used with regard to Turkey, although the situation there is different, because, as he explains, in this case the migration route passes through Turkey anyway and is not artificial.
Fabrice Legger goes on to point out that there are legal issues that have not been clarified, such as how to ensure that the EU's external borders are not violated and how this does not conflict with the right of those in need of protection to receive asylum, as well as under what conditions Frontex can operate where there is a hybrid threat.
Commenting on the reports by various media that Frontex allows pushbacks to take place in the Aegean, without interfering, Mr. Leggeri underlines that when there are suspicions of a violation of fundamental rights, the Agency takes them very seriously and two investigations into such cases have already been carried out, one by the Frontex Management Board and one by the European Parliament, from which it emerged, as it says, that the Agency's officials were not involved in violations of basic rights. It points out that by the beginning of 2022 at the latest, 20 new posts for human rights observers will have been filled at the EU's external borders.
It further notes that in 2021 the flows of illegal immigrants to the EU increased by 70% and within a year the number of illegal immigrants entering the EU from the main migration route of the Mediterranean, i.e. primarily from Libya and Tunisia to Italy, where the focus of the migration problem is now at the heart of the migration problem, doubled. With regard to the migratory flows from Afghanistan, Mr. Leggeri points out that such a movement of Afghans to the EU is indeed expected, but for the most part they are Afghans who already live abroad, and stresses that given the current situation in Afghanistan, it is clear that these people cannot return to their country.
The journalist asks the head of Frontex to comment on whether the EU is dependent on third countries, as was evident in 2020 in the case of Turkey blackmailing the Union by sending migrants to the border, given that the EU-Turkey Agreement essentially gave Ankara the possibility to control the EU's external borders. Mr. Leggeri stresses the importance of the EU demonstrating that it is independent and that it has the capacity to protect its external borders, while adding, finally, that the EU needs a common immigration policy and uniform asylum procedures, since, as Frontex has found, when these do not exist, the impact on the EU's external borders is negative.
