The head of the EU border agency Frontex resigns.
Following harsh criticism of its human rights record and an anti-fraud inquiry, the director of the EU border agency Frontex has resigned.
Fabrice Leggeri, who was censured by the European Parliament last year, wrote a letter to the agency’s management board announcing his resignation. “I am returning my mandate to the management board since it appears that the Frontex mandate on which I was elected and extended in June 2019 has been silently but practically amended,” Leggeri wrote in a letter obtained by the Guardian.
His resignation has yet to be accepted by the Frontex board, which was having an emergency meeting on Friday to address his position, according to the letter.
The letter arrived on the same day as an international group of journalists, including the Guardian, discovered Frontex’s database proved it had been complicit in illegal pushbacks, driving asylum seekers attempting to enter Greece back to Turkey.
A separate inquiry by the EU’s anti-fraud agency, Olaf, prompted the resignation. Olaf acknowledged that an investigation into Frontex was completed on February 15, but declined to disclose further, citing confidentiality regulations to protect those involved and “potential follow-up in administrative and legal actions.”
It’s unclear whether the criticism from human rights organizations or the Olaf inquiry influenced his decision to resign.
Frontex has been led by Leggeri, a French national who previously served in senior positions in his country’s interior and defence ministries, since 2015, when it was transformed from an obscure EU agency to a central plank of EU border control policy. Following the 2015 migration crisis, EU leaders agreed to give the Warsaw-based agency increased authority, personnel, and funding. Frontex is expected to have 10,000 border and coast guards by 2027, with a budget that has more than 19-fold increased since its inception in 2006.
As the executive director of Frontex, Leggeri has received a barrage of criticism, including from a special committee of the European Parliament last year, which accused the agency of failing to defend asylum seekers’ human rights.
Frontex, according to the cross-party committee, had only conducted a cursory inquiry into alleged illegal pushbacks at EU borders. Leggeri was chastised for failing to recruit 40 human rights monitors as required by EU law, although filling his private office lavishly. MEPs discovered that he had appointed 63 staff to his private office, which is more than twice the number of people in the cabinet of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
So far, neither Leggeri nor Frontex have made any public statements about his status.
After Friday’s unusual meeting, a representative for the European Commission said the Frontex board would “communicate on its conclusions.”
Frontex has a “critically vital job,” according to the commission spokeswoman, “which is to assist member states in protecting the common EU external borders while also upholding basic rights.” “And Frontex must have a stable and well-functioning agency in place to achieve this.”
Leggeri’s resignation, according to German MEP Birgit Sippel, who represents the Socialist group in the European Parliament’s home affairs committee, was long overdue.
“For years, Leggeri has mismanaged the EU’s border and coastguard agency, causing severe damage to its reputation and deceiving parliament,” she said. Since then, the evidence of the need for new leadership has grown, and we will closely monitor the succession.”
