Open Letter: Frontex's 20th anniversary should also be its last

October 26, 2024, will mark the 20th anniversary of Frontex, the EU’s border agency. It should also mark the last. In this letter, 89 civil society groups and organisations call for the abolition of Frontex.

26 October 2024

Dear Ms. Ursula von der Leyen,

Frontex is a deadly failed experiment. It has made countless people less safe, eroded the values and ideals the European Union claims to hold dear, and provided a backdoor into government for corporate power. 

When Frontex was found to be complicit in systematic and serious human rights violations in Greece - by none other than the EU’s own anti-fraud watchdog - this should have given Europe pause for thought. 

Instead, Frontex has only expanded, putting a European stamp of approval on murderous border regimes. In the mission letter you wrote to the new Commissioner for Internal Affairs and Migration, you call for Frontex’s standing corps to be increased to 30,000. Frontex patrols the world’s deadliest borders, at which at least 60,000 people have died since 1993. 

In Bulgaria and Greece, Frontex missions work with border guards who beat and abuse people seeking safety and chase them through the forests with dogs. In the central Mediterranean, Frontex guides violent Libyan militias towards people on boats in distress. In North Africa, Frontex works with regimes that detain people in deadly torture camps or leave them for dead in the desert. There is no denying that those often impacted by these fundamental rights abuses, are racialised and other minoritised communities.

Frontex has also opened Europe’s doors to lobbyists. It holds hundreds of meetings with arms and surveillance executives, spending billions that could be going toward helping people but are instead being siphoned into the pockets of profiteers.

These corporate relationships also deepen Frontex’s complicity in abuse. The drones that communicate the position of boats in distress to Libyan militias are also those developed by Israeli firm IAI for use in the occupation of Palestine.

Frontex destroys and undermines the values Europe espouses. It is no coincidence that its former director now sits in the European Parliament on behalf of the far Right, or that another former deputy director spoke publicly about the agency’s inability to prevent far Right infiltration. 

On this anniversary, we are calling on you, the European Commission, and EU leaders to put an end to two decades of failure by:

• Abolishing Frontex: The agency has shown that it cannot be reformed. It is time to end it, and redirect its ballooning budget to policies that ensure the protection of all humanity and fundamental rights. 
• Replacing it with a migration policy rooted in care and compassion: Redistributing funds to provide access to safe pathways and support for people migrating; 
• Ending the incarceration of people in detention centres, and dismantling the deportations regime.
• Ending discriminatory surveillance: Dismantle the surveillance regime that spies on people migrating, in particular racialised people, violates their privacy, and endangers all of our rights. 
• Prioritising a fairer future for everyone: Invest in public housing, welfare, education, health care, legal aid, employment, and a clean environment that is accessible to everyone, regardless of immigration status. 

As economies falter, conflicts surge, and climate change wreaks havoc on both sides of the Mediterranean, Europe faces a choice. It can double down on its history of extraction, militarism, colonialism, and exploitation; pursuing policies that cause people to migrate while making borders ever more violent.

Or you can choose a path that genuinely protects everyone, stepping away from the untenable discourse that migration is a security problem rather than a humanitarian and political issue. What you and European leaders do next will shape our world irrevocably, for better or worse.

Supporting groups and organisations:

Abolish Frontex

ADE Aide aux Droits des personnes Etrangères Douarnenez

Afrique-Europe Interact

All Included Amsterdam

Alternatif Bilisim (AiA-Alternative Informatics Association, Turkey)

ARTICLE 19:

Aspiration

BAAS - Be Aware and Share

Balkanbrücke

Baobab Experience

Bienvenidas Refugiadas Málaga

Bits of Freedom

borderline-europe – Menschenrechte ohne Grenzen e. V

Calais Food Collective 

Campaign Against Arms Trade

Captain Support Network

Caravana Abriendo Fronteras

Care4Calais

Channel Info Project

Collectif Soutien Migrants 13/Al Manba

Collective Aid

CompassCollective

Divest Borders (People & Planet)

EmpowerVan

End Deportations Belfast

Equal Legal Aid

Equinox Initiative for Racial Justice

Europe Cares e.V.

European Digital Rights (EDRi)

European Network Against Racism (ENAR)

European Sex Workers’ Rights Alliance (ESWA)

Feminist Antimilitarist Collective

Fresh Eyes

Global Campaign for Free Expression

Global Campaign to Reclaim People’s Sovereignty, Dismantle Corporate Power and Stop Impunity

Glocal Roots

Grenzenlose Wärme - Refugee Relief Work e.V.

Habibi.Works (Soup & Socks, eV)

Herts for Refugees

Homo Digitalis

Inter Alia

InterEuropean Human Aid Association Germany e.V.

Kaleidoscope

L' Auberge des Migrants

L’Aurora - Grup de Suport

La Cimade

La Mif (Militant·e·s pour l’Interdiction des Frontières)

Lexine Alpert

Love Without Borders

MERA25 Deutschland

Migranos-Movement

Migrants’ Rights Network

migration-control.info project

MiGreat

Migreurop

Missing Voices (REER)

Mobile Info Team

Mouvement Uplifted Africa - MUA

NGO Ecosistemas, Chile

No Name Kitchen

Observatoire des violences policières en Belgique

Otros Mundos Chiapas, México

Plateforme Migr’Afrique

Privacy International

Project ELPIDA e.V.

Project Play

Push Back Alarm Austria

r42-SailAndRescue

Red SOS Refugiados Europa

Refugee Woman Centre

ROOD, Socialistische Jongeren

Sea-Watch

Second Tree

SeebrücCitizen D / Državljan D

SETEM Catalunya

Solidarité sans frontières

Statewatch

Stop Deportations Vienna

Stop the War on Migrants

Stop Wapenhandel

The Channel Monitoring Project

Transbalkan Solidarity Collective

Transnational Institute

Un Ponte Per

Utopia 56

Woodyard

Würzburg Solidarisch e.V.

Yoga and Sport with Refugees

Migreurop Article

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.