ProtectNotSurveil coalition raises alarm about EU’s Frontex expansion plans
The European Commission is set to reform Frontex’s mandate again in 2026. Frontex is the European Border and Coast Guard agency. Responding to the consultation call, the ProtectNotSurveil coalition highlights how reckless the expansion of Frontex’s surveillance capacities would be and how the Commission’s foreseen plans go in the opposite direction of what migrants and affected communities are calling for.
Frontex expansion despite severe issues plaguing the agency
The European Union has increased Frontex’s competences for the past 20 years in the areas of border control and deportations. Its budget has also increased from 6 to 922 million euros. The last reform adopted in 2019 granted the agency increased autonomy, operational capacity, surveillance equipment and personnel. According to experts, this brought Frontex “closer than ever to its original conception of a fully-fledged European border police”.
Yet, the agency has been proven times and again to be complicit in severe human rights violations within and at EU external borders. Frontex suffers from serious issues of secrecy, unchecked autonomy and structural impunity. Nevertheless, President von der Leyen’s political guidelines for 2024-2029 includes a mandate reform with the view “to equip it with state-of-the art technology for surveillance and situational awareness, along with its own equipment and personnel”.
What does our response to the Commission’s consultation say?
In a response to the Commission’s call for evidence, the ProtectNotSurveil coalition, of which EDRi is a member, strongly warns against Frontex’s renewed expansion. The coalition sees the gradual reinforcement of Frontex as an integral part of the problematic expansion of the EU security and surveillance industrial complex, which thrives by developing technologies of control and repression against migrant people. This system has led to systemic and massive human rights violations of migrants, refugees and racialised people, and those who stand in solidarity with them.
Frontex is directly complicit in these human rights violations through its surveillance operations. The technologies it employs play a key role in the EU’s violent and harmful system of border management and migration control. The level of responsibility of Frontex in human rights violations should call into question the very existence of this agency as part of the EU’s migration policy framework.
Parts of the Commission’s plans to strengthen Frontex are particularly worrying, notably the weakening of Frontex’s data protection rules to increase its role in crime detection – something the agency has been caught doing illegally. In addition, the Commission is failing to address Frontex’s highly problematic role in EU-funded research in surveillance technologies and to acknowledge that adjustments to its oversight mechanisms will be insufficient to prevent its harms. Lastly, Frontex’s expanding role in the area of deportations and data collection, reflected in the mandate review and so-called Deportation Regulation proposal, is extremely concerning.
Instead of fueling a harmful and unaccountable agency, the coalition encouraged the Commission to take into account and listen to the input and calls of communities and groups affected by Frontex’s operations as part of this consultation process.