That tens of thousands of people have drowned as they seek out better, safer lives is tragic, not inevitable. There are people and institutions that bear responsibility for these avoidable deaths, and they are not just the smugglers blamed by the political establishment and the press. What’s missing from that framing is the degree to which the European Union and its member states are themselves directly culpable.
The margins of Europe’s crumbling Schengen area are today guarded by increasingly draconian measures. On land, thousands of kilometers of border walls and fences have sprung up over the last decade, especially in the east of the bloc, while so-called “maritime walls” — naval operations that patrol the seas — have been imposed. Online, “digital border walls” — artificial intelligence, drones, satellites, and other digital monitoring systems — have been rolled out to track migrants. The border and coast guards of multiple member states have repeatedly been accused of using extreme violence against migrants, while the power and resources of the EU’s border agency, Frontex, have massively expanded.
When it began operating in 2005, Frontex’s budget was in the low millions, and it was reliant on EU member states to provide personnel and equipment for its activities. It has since become the bloc’s best-funded agency, with an estimated budget of more than €900 million for 2024, and it has achieved a great deal of autonomy. It today plays a major role in surveilling Europe’s borders, in coordinating interventions by national coast guards against migrant boats, and in screening those who make it past EU defenses. In 2019 a regulation was passed to create a force of 10,000 of Frontex’s own border guards within eight years — though the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, now wants to triple that number — and it was later decided that these guards may be authorized to carry firearms.
The backdrop to this profound expansion of Frontex is its flagrant misuse of the power it already holds. Multiple EU member states, with support from the border agency, have been accused of systematically deploying cruel and illegal tactics against migrants. Greece, Italy, Cyprus, Croatia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Spain and Malta have all been accused of forcing migrants back into other countries, which sometimes entails literally pushing unseaworthy vessels away from land and leaving the people onboard vulnerable to sinking beneath the waves. In Greece, the national coast guard has allegedly gone so far as to deliberately throw people into the water to drown them.
Thousands have died because of pushbacks, with Frontex itself being accused of covering up these murderous crimes.
The EU’s “systematic brutality” against migrants, as Doctors Without Borders has termed it, goes much further than pushbacks. According to an investigation by Lighthouse Reports and its various media partners, the bloc also makes use of black sites, where asylum seekers are held in inhumane conditions and tortured, before being illegally deported. Not only is the EU aware of this system, the investigation claims, but its funds have been used to administer it.
That the EU is directly responsible for acts of horrific violence against human beings is clear from the countless reports documenting them. But the bloc’s leaders, rhetorically committed as ever to human rights, don’t especially like to be seen getting their hands dirty; they prefer to outsource violence to faraway places whenever possible. To that end, as another investigation by Lighthouse Reports and its partners has revealed, the EU supports clandestine operations in North Africa in which tens of thousands of people have been picked up and literally dumped in the desert. Funding, equipment and intelligence has been provided by Europe towards this grim project, which sees Europe-bound migrants in Morocco, Mauritania and Tunisia being detained by local forces on the basis of their black skin, transported to the desert and abandoned there, left to fend for themselves against hunger, thirst, and the criminal gangs of the region known to kidnap, torture and sometimes kill those they find.
The EU also offers logistical support, equipment, training and funding to the Libyan coast guard, which has been accused of detaining tens of thousands of migrants illegally deported from Europe and holding them under conditions that amount to torture. Lebanon, too, has received material and logistic support from the EU, in exchange for hardening border controls on its territory; the same is true of Senegal, which has been provided with a range of invasive technologies to be used against migrants. All of this is occurring as part of a broader EU migration strategy of “border externalization,” which has seen Frontex being deployed beyond the borders of the EU into multiple so-called “third countries,” where it works to prevent migrants from ever getting close to Europe.
The consistency with which the EU has been found to break international and its own laws is staggering, yet there are so few mechanisms in place to ensure anyone is ever held accountable. This is an issue at the very heart of the way Frontex is constituted, given that it is a profoundly secretive organization and that its operations are performed by a variety of actors, whether that means its own agents, those of individual EU member states, third countries, private parties, or other EU bodies. This makes it difficult to discern who is responsible for a given operation and the abuses that result from it, with the various culpable parties tending to blame each other. The end result is that abuses systematically take place and nobody is held responsible.
Migration into Europe is not going to stop. Climate breakdown and war will ensure an ever increasing flow of desperate people are forced away from their homes with nowhere else to go besides the EU. Rather than actively encouraging the conditions that lead to this situation, like, for instance, by supplying the weapons used in the very wars displacing people in Africa and West Asia, or by failing to transition away from fossil fuels fast enough, the bloc could stem its increasing militarization and invest heavily in climate crisis prevention, mitigation, and adaptation. It could stop framing migration as a threat to security and instead treat it as a social issue that it bears some responsibility for creating and perpetuating. It could honor the human right to seek asylum, face up to its doublespeak and racism, and allow people to live with dignity.
Or, as its leaders seem intent on doing, it can reinforce the fortress.
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