A resignation ” with immediate effect “. Frenchman Fabrice Leggeri has left his post at the helm of Frontex. Meeting in extraordinary session on 28 and 29 April, the board of directors of the European border and coast guard agency recorded this resignation and decided “that it was no longer necessary to initiate new proceedings against the Executive Director”.
→ REREAD. “A huge cultural change is needed”: an incriminating European Parliament report against Frontex
The director of the agency had been in turmoil for many months, after the proliferation of testimonies from NGOs and the media on operations to push back asylum seekers at the gates of the European Union, with the complicity of agents of Frontex. The European Parliament and the European Court of Auditors have made criticisms. The European Anti-Fraud Office (Olaf) gave the coup de grace. Its report from last February, not public but a summary of which was presented to MEPs“reveals that Frontex management was aware of the human rights violations and deliberately avoided reporting them”, as Erik Marquardt, the German MEP from the Greens, reported on March 2.
“Fabrice Leggeri left before being thanked”
“Fabrice Leggeri left before being thanked. There are too many direct observations of pushbacks by civil society and too many cases brought before the European Court of Human Rights; the European Commission, which has long been in denial, could no longer support it”, estimates Thomas Lacroix, researcher at the CNRS, specialist in migrations at the Center for International Research at Sciences Po.
These practices of repression were disguised under the name of operations of “prevention at the start”, in the Frontex classified database, which was accessed by a consortium of French, German, Swiss and Dutch journalists. According to this survey, published in particular by The world and the German magazine The mirror on the eve of Fabrice Leggeri’s resignation, at least 957 asylum seekers between March 2020 and September 2021 were victims of these illegal refoulements carried out by the Greek coast guard, with the assistance of Frontex. Some asylum seekers had even already arrived on Greek territory before being arrested and again forcibly dumped at sea. In 2021, the deportation of 32,000 people to Libya was made possible by cooperation between the European Union European and this country.
“A breathless system”
“Beyond one man, a whole system is in question and out of breath, believes Thomas Lacroix. Certainly, human rights violations will not disappear overnight, but this resignation is perhaps a sign of a positive development. »
→ MAINTENANCE. Frontex: “We do not want to build a fortress Europe”
Fabrice Leggeri defends himself by judging that repressions are “a notion more media than legal”, in an interview with Sunday newspaper after his resignation. He also considers, in his letter of departure, that the mandate of Frontex on which he was elected in 2015 and re-elected in 2019 “has silently but effectively been changed”. For its part, the agency’s board of directors “clearly affirms that effective border control and the protection of fundamental rights are fully compatible”. The left-wing group in the European Parliament has asked for a debate to be held during the week on Frontex and its mandate.