Thursday

28th Mar 2024

Frontex plan to deploy to Africa gets initial 'green light'

  • European home affairs commissioner Ylva Johansson in Senegal last week
Listen to article

European Union authorities are mulling sending armed border and coastguard forces on missions beyond Europe for the first time, with Senegal as an initial destination.

Although the plan for the agency, Frontex, to post officers to Africa, is still at the discussion stage, the agency's main role so far has been to restrict migration to Europe — and that makes the initiative highly symbolic and, to some, deeply troubling.

Read and decide

Join EUobserver today

Get the EU news that really matters

Instant access to all articles — and 20 years of archives. 14-day free trial.

... or subscribe as a group

In a sign that the plan has a measure of momentum, Senegal's interior minister has given a "green light for technical discussions," the European Commission confirmed on Monday (14 February).

The European Commission said it was considering sending experts to Senegal next month to hammer out details on a Frontex mission, which it says would also seek to curtail illegal fishing.

The plan emerged last week when Ylva Johansson, the European Commissioner for home affairs, told a press conference in Senegal that such a mission would be "the first time ever that we have that kind of cooperation with a country in Africa."

The degree to which such a mission would address migrant smuggling and security-related threats at the borders of Senegal remains unclear.

But the deployment would be done under a so-called model agreement with third countries drafted by the European Commission last December to combat "illegal immigration and cross-border crime" and carry out returns of unwanted migrants and rejected asylum seekers.

Counter productive

Among the outstanding questions is whether agents from Frontex, which has been under fire for mistreatment of migrants in Europe, would have immunity while in Senegal. That's a status its agents have had on other missions outside the EU including in the Western Balkans.

Roderick Parkes of the Berlin-based German Council on Foreign Relations says sending a Frontex mission to Senegal could be counterproductive in terms of restricting migration.

"When we put border controls in place, no matter how well-intentioned, they tend to be unsympathetic to local practice, and so that creates smuggling networks," Parkes told EUobserver.

"The more we go in and say we're going to help individual countries control their borders, the more we undermine that, and the more it kind of becomes self-fulling," he said.

Parkes also said that African regional efforts at establishing open borders and ensuring free movement among neighbouring African states probably would be more conducive to preventing smuggling.

"We're completely blind to the fact that Africans like to move regionally and look for work," he said.

Tanya Cox, director of the Concord, pan-European network of relief and development organisations, said the plan to dispatch Frontex to Senegal was evidence of an imbalance of power between the EU and some African states.

"What is wrong in this relationship is that the EU imposes its solution without first seeing whether they are appropriate," Cox said. "It seems that the European Union is again imposing its way, its agenda, it's solutions and this is most particularly what is wrong," she said.

Edwin Ikhuoria, Africa executive director at the ONE Campaign, an advocacy group, also took a critical stand on the Frontex plan.

"This move does not tackle the underlying, root causes of the problem – why are people leaving? It mistakenly focuses on the short-term, addressing the effects of the problem instead of the causes."

Africa needs to create as many as 15 million jobs a year to keep up with its growing youth population, Ikhuoria said.

Frontex already is in the spotlight for possible rights violations taking place inside Europe, including off the Greek islands. The plan to deploy to Africa may only serve to exacerbate concerns about accountability, particularly during operations in African states with weak democratic institutions.

Frontex does have a new fundamental rights officer, Jonas Grimheden, empowered to investigate any wrongdoing by the agency.

Although Grimheden's team of some 20 monitors is set to double, they are currently stretched thin and have no real power to block decisions to deploy overseas. But he said his team could carry out checks anywhere.

"We are following developments and provide input into any preparations in such cases and depending on the nature of operations, we may also monitor activities on the spot," he told EUobserver.

The agency's expanding role also comes as the European Commission gears up to spend some €4.35bn of its foreign budget over the next few years on African migration issues.

Analysis

Brussels in push for more oversight over troubled EU border agency

The European Commission is mulling additional oversight of the EU's powerful border and coast guard agency, Frontex. "We should at least once a year have a political management board for Frontex with ministers," said EU home affairs commissioner, Ylva Johansson.

EU Commission cannot hold Frontex to account

MEPs probing the EU's border agency Frontex cross-examined the agency's director. They also spoke to EU home affairs commissioner Ylva Johansson, who made it clear she had little sway over the agency.

Exclusive

Frontex chief took €8,500 private flight to Brussels meeting

Frontex spent €8,500 to send its executive director Fabrice Leggeri on a private jet to attend an evening meeting in Brussels. The Warsaw-based agency said there were scheduling conflicts preventing him taking a commercial flight.

Podcast

Eurafrique

Could Françafrique — the French sphere of influence that outlived the end of French colonialism — still be revived on a European scale, as Eurafrique?

Investigation

How migrants risk becoming drug addicts along Balkan route

Psychotropic drug abuse is one of the many dangers migrants face along the Balkan route. In overcrowded camps, doctors prescribe tranquilisers to calm people down. And black market circuits and pharmacies selling drugs without prescription contribute to the issue.

Analysis

Election in sight, EU mood music changes on offshoring asylum

Designating a country like Rwanda as 'safe' under EU rules to send an asylum-seeker there requires strict conditions to be met first. But a backdoor clause introduced into EU legislation allows a future commission to strip out those requirements.

Latest News

  1. Kenyan traders react angrily to proposed EU clothes ban
  2. Lawyer suing Frontex takes aim at 'antagonistic' judges
  3. Orban's Fidesz faces low-polling jitters ahead of EU election
  4. German bank freezes account of Jewish peace group
  5. EU Modernisation Fund: an open door for fossil gas in Romania
  6. 'Swiftly dial back' interest rates, ECB told
  7. Moscow's terror attack, security and Gaza
  8. Why UK-EU defence and security deal may be difficult

Stakeholders' Highlights

  1. Nordic Council of MinistersJoin the Nordic Food Systems Takeover at COP28
  2. Nordic Council of MinistersHow women and men are affected differently by climate policy
  3. Nordic Council of MinistersArtist Jessie Kleemann at Nordic pavilion during UN climate summit COP28
  4. Nordic Council of MinistersCOP28: Gathering Nordic and global experts to put food and health on the agenda
  5. Friedrich Naumann FoundationPoems of Liberty – Call for Submission “Human Rights in Inhume War”: 250€ honorary fee for selected poems
  6. World BankWorld Bank report: How to create a future where the rewards of technology benefit all levels of society?

Stakeholders' Highlights

  1. Georgia Ministry of Foreign AffairsThis autumn Europalia arts festival is all about GEORGIA!
  2. UNOPSFostering health system resilience in fragile and conflict-affected countries
  3. European Citizen's InitiativeThe European Commission launches the ‘ImagineEU’ competition for secondary school students in the EU.
  4. Nordic Council of MinistersThe Nordic Region is stepping up its efforts to reduce food waste
  5. UNOPSUNOPS begins works under EU-funded project to repair schools in Ukraine
  6. Georgia Ministry of Foreign AffairsGeorgia effectively prevents sanctions evasion against Russia – confirm EU, UK, USA

Join EUobserver

EU news that matters

Join us