a report overwhelms the former leaders of the European agency Frontex

The former management of the border surveillance agency Frontex was aware of the illegal deportations of migrants to Greece and is said to have even co-financed deportations. This is revealed by a damning report of which the German weekly Der Spiegel publishes excerpts, Thursday, July 28.

Frontex was aware very early on of these illegal, sometimes brutal returns of asylum seekers to Turkey, says this still confidential report from the European Office for the Fight against Fraud (Olaf), also consulted by the newspaper The world (paid item) and investigative site Lighthouse Reports.

“Instead of preventing pushbacks (refoulement without prior study of the asylum request of the refugees), the former boss Fabrice Leggeri and his collaborators concealed them. They lied to the European Parliament and covered up the fact that the agency supported some rejections with European taxpayers’ money”, summarizes the German magazine. The conclusions of the investigators had caused the resignation of Fabrice Leggeri at the end of April.

During an official visit to Athens, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock felt that the circumstances of each case of refoulement had to be clarified. “Although I obviously cannot verify in detail what is going on in each individual case”, “there was some pushbacks incompatible with European law”lamented the minister during a visit to the Frontex offices in the Greek capital.

Olaf reports in particular that at least six Greek boats, co-financed by Frontex, would have been involved in more than a dozen pushbacks between April and December 2020, which the former director has always rejected. Asked about the publication, a spokeswoman for the European Commission pointed out that“a series of measures” had already been put in place to settle the question of the governance of the agency, headed since the beginning of July by the Latvian Aija Kalnaja.