Frontex performs key functions in protecting the EU’s external borders, but despite being given a strengthened mandate in 2019, it has not yet fully demonstrated its effectiveness to Member States and has even failed to implement a previous mandate given in 2016.
This is the finding made public on Monday 7 June by the European Court of Auditors in a new report on the European Border and Coast Guard Agency. This is a somewhat “worrying” finding, based on responses to questionnaires sent to Member States in particular, as legislators have given the agency new tasks, explained Leo Brincat, who is responsible for the report.
The report highlights a series of weaknesses in the way the phenomenon of irregular immigration is properly addressed, such as the poor use of the Eurosur system on surveillance at sea, coordinated by Frontex.
“While some countries do enter information in near real time into Eurosur, others do so only once a week. In other words, an incident that occurs at the border (e.g. the arrival of a large group of migrants) may not appear in the European system until a week after the fact”, the Court notes.
“As the Member States/Countries associated with the Schengen area submit their reports in different formats, the data is difficult to aggregate and is sometimes even inaccessible to other countries for technical reasons. This can have a negative impact on data quality”, the report adds.
The Court notes further weaknesses in the transmission of information on irregular crossings. “In addition to having exemptions for land and sea border crossing points (for which they are not obliged to record all events), Member States/Schengen associated countries are not obliged to report illegal air border crossings, either at air border crossing points or in national airspace. Only a minority of them voluntarily report events at border crossings. This means that the European situation table compiled by Frontex does not offer a near real-time view of the situation at the EU’s air borders or at land and sea border crossing points”.
Furthermore, “Member States have not agreed on any standards for the performance capabilities of their border surveillance or other monitoring equipment. This complicates Frontex’s task of identifying potential vulnerabilities in Member States’ detection capabilities at border controls and could result in non-detection of border crossings and therefore under-reporting of events in Eurosur”.
The auditors also found that the last external evaluation of the Agency was in July 2015 and the new regulation governing Frontex’s activities was approved in 2019 without any prior analysis. “However, it has profoundly changed Frontex’s activity”, with the agency to have up to 10,000 agents by 2027 (compared to 750 in 2019) and to operate with a budget of €900 million per year (compared to €460 million in 2020).
Nor has Frontex provided any information on the impact or cost of its activities, including joint operations with member countries.
Finally, the Court is also critical of Frontex’s role in fighting crime in general, noting that a real framework for information exchange with other agencies or authorities has yet to be put in place, even though Frontex has also been asked to collect information on smugglers or to detect links with terrorism.
Link to the report: https://bit.ly/3cloxeL (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)