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Page 1: 12 seconds to decide
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Twelve Seconds to Decide

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Twelve Seconds to DecideIn search of excellence:

Frontex and the principle of Best Practice

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Note to readers

This book does not describe Frontex’s work but seeks to explain its workingmethods, the quest for professional excellence and the overarching principlesused in identifying and fostering best practice at the EU’s borders - a processthat has become an institutional mantra for Frontex in recent years.

With Frontex’s role continuing to evolve within the wider context of bordercontrol and European policy, this book is designed to bring the workof border guards closer to the public they serve, by illuminating the depth andvariety of Frontex’s eãorts to support them in the challenges they face everyday. It is written as much for the general reader as for practitioners.After all, public security is an issue that aãects everyone.

Within the wider context of border control and European policy, the roleof Frontex continues to constantly evolve – and that will always needclarifying to the public.

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Introduction | 8

On any day in Europe:At the Land Border | 19

Frontex:An evolutionaryconcept

• A Brief Historyof Frontex | 29

• Learning howto Learn: EnhancingAnalytical Capacity | 33

• More, and Faster:The Focus on‘Response Capacity’ | 47

• Streamliningthe System: Why

‘Interoperability’Matters | 55

On any day in Europe:At the Air Border | 61

Frontex Today:A Treasuryof Best Practice

• Background | 69

• Training | 71

• Car theft | 75

• Counterfeiting | 81

• HumanTraäcking | 87

• Dog Handling | 93

• Research& Development | 97

• Returns | 101

• SafeguardingHuman Rights | 105

On any day in Europe:At the Sea Border | 109

Conclusion

• The Futureof Frontex – 2014and Beyond | 117

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In 2004, when the European Union expandedfrom 15 to 25 member states, extending its bor-ders hundreds of kilometres to the east, it be-came the largest economic and political bloc theworld has ever seen. Following the accessionof two more states in 2007, and Croatia in 2013,the EU now covers 4.3 million square kilometresthat are inhabited by 504 million people: about7 percent of the global population.

The combined GDP of these millions, however,amounts to some 20 percent of the total – morethan that of the United States. And that createda challenge: because to the billions of less for-tunate people of the world, the prosperous andstable democracies of the EU had never lookeda more attractive destination.

Some 107,000 people were detected crossingthe EU’s external borders outside of normalcontrols in 2013 and some 425,000 applicationsfor asylum were lodged in Member States. Butthere are many regions and countries of theworld that receive proportionally more migrantsand refugees per year than the EU: Pakistan, forexample, or Turkey, or even Yemen. The crisisin Syria and the movement of over 2.6 millionrefugees to its immediate neighbours sincethe start of the war there put European figuresfirmly into perspective. ©

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The Somali port of Bosasois a major transit pointfor Ethiopian migrants seekinga new life in the Middle East.Smugglers charge $100 for thenotoriously dangerous crossingto Yemen, but the migrantsare undeterred. ‘I will do whateverit takes,’ says Mustariya, 19

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Introduction

9

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11 700 km

45 500 km

600

EU externalland borders

EU externalsea borders

EU externalair borders

airports

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IE

UK

FR

NO

SE

FI

EE

LV

LT

PL

CZ

ATHU

HR

SK

RO

BG

EL

CYMT

DE

IT

LICH

BE

NL

PT

ES

IS

DK

SI

LU

AZORES (PT)

CANARY ISLANDS (ES)

MADEIRA (PT)

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BulgariaCyprusCroatiaIreland

RomaniaUnited Kingdom

Switzerland

IcelandLiechtenstein

Norway

AustriaBelgium

Czech RepublicDenmark

Estonia

GermanyGreece

Spain

HungaryItaly

LithuaniaLuxembourg

Latvia

MaltaNetherlands

PolandPortugal

Sweden

SloveniaSlovakia

FinlandFrance

SCHENGEN AREA

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STOLEN CARS

EXCISE GOODS (ALCOHOL, CIGARETTES, PETROL ETC)

HARMFUL CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL MATERIALS

FAKE BRANDS

PRECIOUS METALS AND STONES

CASH COURIERS

TRAFFICKING IN HUMAN BEINGSPEOPLE SMUGGLING

TRAFFICKING IN CHILDREN

RADIOACTIVE MATERIALS

UNSAFE FOOD

PROTECTED SPECIES

WEAPONS FORGED MEDICINES

TERRORISM

ORGAN TRADING

DRUGS

CROSS BORDER CRIMES

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Organisedcriminal gangsplay an importantand increasing rolein the smugglingof people, too,a trade thatoften feedsprostitution,forced labour,even slavery.

Europe’s relative prosperity, and the lack ofinternal borders within the Schengen area, havecreated other issues. The EU is increasingly a lu-crative target for organised crime, which comesin an almost endless variety of forms: drugssmuggled via South America, Africa and Spain;counterfeit electronics from China; cloned andsub-standard medicines from Pakistan; petroland tobacco smuggled from Belarus or Ukraine.Organised criminal gangs play an importantand increasing role in the smuggling of people,too, a trade that often feeds prostitution, forcedlabour, even slavery.The challenges facing those responsible for bor-der control in 21st century Europe are greaterand more varied than they have ever been.

These challenges range from referring asylumclaims, to search and rescue at sea to tacklingtrans-national crime. Coupled with the threatof political violence in Europe and the unpredict-able and often sudden nature of global changes,not unnaturally many Europeans look to theirexternal borders as an important element oftheir safety.

Whether they are right to do so is hotly debated,and goes to the heart of a deeper question thatwill have to be answered as the world’s popula-tion grows ever larger and younger, and the EUcontinues to expand: what is Europe’s place inthe world?

Whatever the answer, and particularly since theadvent of Schengen and the abolition of manyinternal border controls, the nations of Europehave been obliged for the first time to startthinking of their external borders notas individual states, but collectively – which waslargely why Frontex was created in 2005.

The world has changed dramatically since eventhen. The ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings of 2011 prompt-ed new flows of Europe-bound migrants. TheSyrian civil war then caused an unprecedentedrefugee situation with many seeking safety inEurope. Migration patterns have proved veryfluid.

The migration hotspots have also shifted con-stantly, from the Canaries in the west in 2006,to the Central Mediterranean in 2008, to theGreek-Turkish land border in 2010, to theCentral Mediterranean again in 2011, and backto the Greek islands in 2012. The Italian islandof Lampedusa, just 167 km from the coast ofTunisia, remained a hotspot throughout 2013.But, wherever the hotspot might be, one thingseems certain: global migration will increase.Already some 700 million travellers a yearcross the EU’s external borders so the delicatetask of controlling Europe’s borders whilemaximising the ease of bona fide travel hasnever been more challenging. This is whereFrontex comes in.

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Canary Islands

2010

Canary Islands Canary Islands

2008 2009

Canary Islands Canary Islands Canary Islands

2011 2012 2013

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An EU border guard has on average just 12 sec-onds to decide whether the traveller in frontof them is legitimate or not, or to assess if theirdocuments are genuine. For tens of thousandsof people each year, refusal at the border postcan change a life.

Those 12 seconds may also be the only time thata victim of human traäcking comes into con-tact with law enforcement authorities beforethey descend into the ‘underground’ where thedarkest kinds of exploitation can occur. The bor-der guard’s decision, in other words, can havethe profoundest consequences for the individualstanding before them – and it has never beenmore important to get this process right.

This is what Frontex is about: an ever-evolvingorganisation dedicated not just to streamlin-ing existing practices, but to their constantimprovement as well. The pursuit of profes-sional excellence – the quest to establish ‘bestpractice’ on the EU’s borders – has become akind of institutional mantra. When the securityand economic well-being of Europe’s millionsdepend as much as they do on those 12 secondsto decide, nothing less will do.

⦁ Eastern Land Borders Route⦁ Apulia and Calabria⦁ West African Route⦁ Eastern Mediterranean⦁ Central Mediterranean Route⦁ Western Mediterranean Route⦁ Western Balkans Route⦁ Circular Route between Greece

and Albania

evolving MigratoryPressure at the EU’sExternal Borders

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REGULAR VS IRREGULAR TRAFFIC AT EXTERNAL BORDERS (2012)

700 milliontravellers cross the EU’s external borders each year

70 thousand*illegal border crossings

= 70 000 border crossings.

* data for 2012.Source: Frontex Annual Risk Analysis 2013,www.frontex.europa.eu; European Commission SWD (2013) 528, www.ec.europa.eu

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On any day in Europe:

At the Land Border

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Some 3.6 million peopleused the Terespol BCP in 2012,an average of 9,841a day.

Terespol,Polish-Belorusian border,September 2013

As one of the busiest land border crossing pointson the EU’s eastern frontier, Terespol has beendesignated one of Frontex’s 23 permanent ‘fo-cal points’ since 2008. A half-dozen specialistguest oäcers drawn from the European BorderGuard Team (EBGT) pool are always deployedhere, usually for one to two months at a time,although occasionally for as many as six, insupport of a large and smoothly-run Polishborder operation. Like at other eastward-facingborder crossings, the guards at Terespol areon constant look-out for smugglers of fuel and,particularly, cigarettes. Belorusian brands canbe sold even in Poland for three times what theycost in Minsk. The border crossing point (BCP) isalso a major gateway for vehicles stolen in theEU destined for sale on the black markets of theformer Soviet Union.

The border follows the River Bug, one of thecontinent’s great dividing lines – between Or-thodox and Catholic peoples, the Cyrillic and Ro-man alphabetic worlds, and in World War II, theline of demarcation between Germany and theSoviet Union. The volume of traäc across theBug today is greater than it has ever been. Some3.6 million people used the Terespol BCP in 2012,an average of 9,841 a day. Among them were thedrivers of half a million trucks, for this is also a

Two border guards checka freight train from Belarus

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major east-west trading route. In high seasonthe queue of trucks at the border can stretch for30 km, and can take two whole days to negoti-ate: a striking reminder of what the border-freeSchengen area is for.

So great is the number of trucks that in 2008it was found necessary to build a large newcustoms point, 5 km into Poland, because therewas no room at the BCP itself. The customscentre is connected to the border by a dedi-cated road that is heavily fenced, and monitoredby 80 closed-circuit TV cameras. All incomingtrucks are x-rayed at the customs post. At theBCP, selected trucks are checked for migrantstowaways with super-sensitive heartbeatdetectors, or searched for contraband by sniãerdogs (Terespol has a pack of a dozen trainedfor various purposes). More chillingly, all trucksmust pass through a radio-metric scanner tocheck for radioactive materials.

In September 2013, the guards at Terespol faceanother challenge – rising numbers of Chechens,who are increasingly choosing Terespol as theirprinciple point of entry into the EU. In 2013, infact, some 98 percent of all asylum applicationsin Poland were lodged at Terespol. The rate ofincrease is startling: in the first six months of2013, there were 9,499 asylum applications here,compared to 8,940 in the whole of 2012. Apartfrom asylum applicants, over 10,000 peoplewere refused entry at Terespol over the sameperiod, for every sort of reason, compared to

12,000 in the whole of 2012. “There are morepeople on the move in general, all along theborder,” says the sector commander, Lt-ColPiotr Grytczuk. “The increased migrant flow isobviously connected to the economic situationin the countries they come from.”There is, however, a specific local reason for theincreased number of would-be migrants fromChechnya. The vast majority of them are headedfor Germany, attracted by a recent change toGerman law, known as the “Hartz IV” reform,under which asylum-seekers are entitled to asocial security payment equal to the nationalminimum wage of €370 per month. This isn’t

Below: Terespol is oneof the busiest land bordercrossings into the EU

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Right: Patrolling betweenPoland and Belarus along theRiver Bug, one of the Europeancontinent’s major dividing lines

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much in Western European terms, but it is a lotof money to the average Chechen.It is no coincidence that three of the sixFrontex guest oäcers operating here – theothers are Austrian, Spanish, and Latvian – areGerman. What happens at this border hasdirect consequences for Berlin.

Every year a handful of migrants attempt tosneak across the River Bug, which becomesenticingly shallow and narrow in the summermonths. The bank on the Polish side is regularlypatrolled by guards equipped with quad bikesand tracker dogs, but by far the greater numberof migrants arriving at Terespol do so not on footor by car, but by train. The town lies on the maininternational line between Berlin and Moscow;there is also a local train that shuttles back andforth from the Belorusian border town of Brest.Some 42 trains stop at Terespol every day.

The immigration oäce of the Polish BorderGuard — Straż Graniczna — at the station, builtin 2005, is specifically designed to cope withthe huge numbers of people passing through.Its reception areas are large and light and clean.The first train of the day from Brest, at 7am, isusually the busiest, and today is no exception.Of the 360 people of various nationalities onboard, 80 have come without any visa. Fifty ofthese are claiming asylum, all of them Chechen.The remaining 30 have been refused entry – ei-ther because, for whatever reason, they did not©

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The underside of everytrain must be checkedfor contraband

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claim asylum, or else because their request for atemporary, 15-day visa was denied – and will beput on the train back to Brest at 11am.

It is a typical day at this border crossing. Someof the would-be migrants will undoubtedly tryagain in future. Martin, one of the German guestoäcers on duty at the train station, describesthe extraordinary persistence of one womanwhose passport was recently found to contain28 separate stamps of refusal of entry. “We onlyapply the process,” Martin shrugs. It is not forborder guards to decide who gets a visa andwho does not. “Of course anyone is free to re-apply as often as they wish.”

The Polish operation on this sector of theborder is necessarily a large one, with 407 staãresponsible for policing just 21.6 km of frontier.Frontex’s role here is not merely to plug gaps inthe line, because, in truth, there are none; thereseems little doubt that Straż Graniczna couldmanage Terespol very well by themselves – oreven better, since one of the acknowledgedkeys to the eäcient screening of migrants is theability to speak Russian, a skill not possessed bymany Frontex guest oäcers.In an example of good practice at an individualborder point, over 90 percent of the bor-der guards at Terespol already speak Rus-sian; those that do not are oãered languageclasses, which are also available in Georgian.

Frontex does, however, add value in other ways.“The opportunity to exchange information andknowledge with guest oäcer colleagues fromother countries is really useful to us,” says Lt-ColGrytczuk. “We could not operate eäciently ina vacuum.” The skills brought to Terespol byGuest Oäcer specialists in, for example, docu-ment forgery or stolen vehicle identification, areparticularly welcome.

On a formal level, the Border Guard headquartersin Terespol also hosts a Frontex focal point oäceas part of Frontex joint operations, where datafrom the border is regularly and meticulously fedinto the JORA system (Joint Operations Report-ing Application) for analysis back in Warsaw. Justas important, however, is the ability of guestoäcers to exploit what Grytczuk calls, “the infor-mal Frontex network,” which often supplementsoäcial channels with quick tips on the latest indocument fraud or concealment.

Martin, a stalwart of the EBGT who completesthree pool missions a year, is a strong believerin the value of this informal, social border guardnetwork. “You always meet someone you know,wherever you go,” he says. Diana Jungi, projectmanager of Joint Operation Focal Points agrees:

“Guest Oäcers are like a large family now”. It maybe an unintended consequence of the poolingsystem, but the benefits are real and more thanapparent to Lt-Col Grytczuk and his team.

A guest oícer from Germanyat work in Terespolwith the Straż Graniczna

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The 1985 Schengen Accord wassigned on board the PrincessMarie-Astrid on the Moselleriver near the town of Schengen,where the territories of France,Germany and Luxembourg meet

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1A brief history of Frontex

The organisation now known as Frontex grewout of the Schengen Accord of 1985, when fiveEuropean states (Belgium, France, Germany,Luxembourg and the Netherlands) agreed toabolish their internal borders. The SchengenAccord, although signed independently of theEuropean Union framework, was neverthelessthe first and most direct application of one ofthe founding principles of the European Com-munity, laid down in the Treaty of Rome in 1957:that there should be no restriction on the freemovement of goods, services, capital and people.

The creation of a single external border broughtwith it a need to coordinate how thatborder was managed. The driver of this changewas not immigration so much as organised crime,which of course has no respect for nationalboundaries. As the Schengen area expanded – by

Frontex:

An evolutionaryconcept

2014, there were 26 member countries – policeand judicial cooperation between them increasedexponentially, until in 1999, under the Treaty ofAmsterdam, the concept was finally incorporatedinto the EU framework.This led to the creation of a body called theExternal Borders Practitioners (EBP) CommonUnit, which was tasked with overseeing commonborder management operations via half a dozennew ‘ad hoc’ centres on border control, whichwere located across the EU from Finland to Spain.

With the European Union rapidly expandingeastwards, and in order to improve the eä-ciency of the EBP Common Unit, these ad hoccentres were further drawn together by a Euro-pean Council Regulation in 2004, which createda new institution headquartered in Warsaw: theEuropean Agency for the Management of Op-erational Cooperation at the External Borders ofthe Member States of the European Union – aname that was rapidly shortened to Frontex.

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FRONTEX GROWTH

30 300

2006 2013

ANNUAL BUDGET (millions)

STAFF

€19 €94

OPERATIONAL DAYS210 1 688

TRAINING DAYS1 012 12 457

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Evolution,after all, is inthe nature of anorganisation likeFrontex, becausethe challenges onEurope’s bordersare also constantlyevolving.

as the role expected of the agency changed andclarified. Further amendments seem a certainty.Evolution, after all, is in the nature of an organi-sation like Frontex, because the challenges onEurope’s borders are also constantly evolving.The agency has had to grow fast. In five years,its staã expanded from around 30 people tomore than 300, while its annual budget, eventhough constrained by economic force majeure,grew from €19 million in 2006 to around €82million in 2013. In 2009, a newly-confident Fron-tex began to make long-term plans in a wayit had not done before, and produced its firstmulti-annual plan for the agency’s developmentover the period 2010-2013. Four main areas ofactivity were identified as being crucial for theagency’s development over the long term, andsingled out for improvement: Knowledge, Re-sponse, Interoperability and Performance.

As the first multi-annual plan came to a close,what had Frontex achieved in these key areas

– and what was the opinion of Frontex staãmembers themselves?

The learning curve was steep during the fledglingagency’s first five years. The expansion of theEU and the geographical extension of its easternborders coincided with a period of heightenedterrorism and a number of wars, leading tounprecedented flows of refugees from Afghani-stan, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East,Africa and Asia.

Meanwhile, Frontex faced a barrage of criticism.Some politicians were sceptical: they suspectedthat the creation of Frontex implied a loss ofsovereignty over their national borders. Othercriticisms focused not on border control at all,but on areas such as visa policy, asylum, deten-tion, immigration and other issues beyond Fron-tex’s remit. The agency became something of ascapegoat for anti-border protestors, blamedfor unpopular policies and laws created eitherby the member states that Frontex serves or theCommission to which it answers.

April 2007 saw the establishment, followinga European Council amendment to the 2004founding Regulation, of RABITs (Rapid BorderIntervention Teams), the first of which wasdeployed in 2010 along the River Evros on theGreek-Turkish land border. The Evros region hadbecome a major hotspot for irregular migration.

Frontex continues to evolve as an agency. TheRegulation has been amended twice, once in2007 and again in 2011, as the need for greatertransparency and accountability emerged, and

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Learning how to learn:Enhancing Analytical Capacity

The importance of screening and debriefing

By far the most useful source of intelligence forFrontex’s Risk Analysis Unit (RAU), according toAntonio Saccone, head of Operational Analysisand Evaluation, is the migrants themselves asthey arrive in Europe, fresh from, typically, longjourneys across multiple third-country borders,often in the care of organised smuggling gangs.

“Statistics on migrants, their nationalities andidentities, are relatively easy to collect, but weknow very little from statistics about howthese people reached the border.”

The migrants may be able to elucidate the precisedeparture and arrival points used by the smug-glers, the addresses of safe houses, the routesthey prefer, the size and type of boats used tocross the sea, the prices paid to facilitators, andmuch more besides. Helping the national author-ities to dismantle the smuggling networks hasbeen a Frontex priority since its inception – andinformation of this sort can be vital for police onthe trail of the big players. Gleaning this infor-mation is a job that falls to debriefers; specialistoäcers deployed to operations.

Debriefing migrants in a timely manner has alsoproved vital at a local level. In one celebrated in-cident, on the River Evros on the Greek-Turkish

land border in 2011, the lives of a migrant familywere saved when it emerged from an interviewthat they had been abandoned by the smugglerson a certain rock in mid-stream: information thelocal police would never have obtained in time,if at all.

But what of the smugglers who had left themthere? The debriefers were eventually able toestablish the timings and the precise departurepoint on the far side of the river favoured by thisparticular gang. Armed police were deployed inambush, and several smugglers, who were alsoarmed, were arrested.

“The importance of debriefing has been wellunderstood since at least 2007, but we weren’tvery good at it then,” says Saccone. “To beginwith we requested debriefing specialists fromthe member states, but the quality of the oäc-ers we received was very mixed.” In 2009, in abid to raise standards and harmonise debriefingtechniques, Frontex created a taskforce of EUborder experts, who were charged with collat-ing best practices from around Europe, notablyfrom the UK, Malta and Italy.

The skills deemed essential in a good debrieferwere identified. “Set questions are no good. Everyconversation is unique. The information they of-fer is all voluntary, informal. It helps if debriefersdon’t wear uniforms; and they must never ask formigrants’ names, ever – because it is the infor-mation, not their identity, that matters.”

“The migrantsthemselves often

have very interestingthings to say.For instance,

I’d heard thatchemical weapons

were being usedin Syria a month

before Reutersreported it.”

Petros Chatzis,Intelligence Oäcer, Frontex

Operational Oäce, Lesvos,May 2013

Across the world, more peopleare on the move than everbefore. According to the UN,in 2013 the number of internationalmigrants reached 232m - andthey came from every partof the world

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Until 2011, Frontex was limited in what it coulddo with the data collected by its screeners anddebriefers. Under an amendment to the found-ing regulation in that year, however, Frontexwas empowered to make much greater use of it.For example, information on a person suspected,by local border authorities, of being involvedin cross-border crime, such as smuggling ortraäcking, can now be analysed and securelytransmitted on a case-by-case basis to EU lawenforcement agencies, including Europol. Atthe same time, this information must remaincarefully protected, in line with European dataprotection legislation and Frontex’s duty to safe-guard personal data.

Frontex can also use personal data to enhance itsown risk analyses, the results of which are deper-sonalised, and it is not permitted to conduct itsown investigations, which remains a matter formember state police authorities.It takes skill, experience, and often the servicesof a first-class interpreter to establish whethera migrant is telling the truth. Dorte, a guest of-ficer from Denmark, perhaps exemplifies whatit takes to be a good screener. A policewomanof 20 years, she has worked on various interna-tional assignments for Interpol and UN missions,including on local police training missions inSarajevo and southern Afghanistan. “You devel-op a kind of sixth sense for when people are nottelling you the truth,” she says, between screen-ing sessions in the interview oäce, a dedicatedmobile oäce on the dockside at Mytilini.

Frontex designed a two-week training coursefor debriefers, which includes mock interviews,and an exam at the end of the fortnight.

“The exam is tough, and not everyone passes,”says Saccone. “But our capacity is steadilyincreasing, and we are expanding. We haveset the standard for best practice in debriefingtechniques – and we are increasingly findingthat member states’ border services are tryingto match that standard.”

From 2009, Frontex began to develop its firstreference material designed for on-the-spot useby debriefers, including the types of informationthey should focus on eliciting, the commonestindicators of useful knowledge, and so on, withthe ambitious aim of establishing a standardoperating procedure right across Europe. “A mi-grant should expect to be treated exactly thesame, wherever they might arrive on the EU’sborders,” says Saccone. “That’s the goal – andwe have had good results over the last twoyears.”

As a part of this streamlining eãort, it wasdecided to separate oã the screening process atthe border – the establishment of a migrant’sidentity and country of origin – from the moredetailed business of debriefing. This apparentlysimple task is more complicated than it firstsounds. Migrants are often undocumented andcan have all sorts of reasons to conceal theiridentities or their origins.

“...We have setthe standard forbest practicein debriefingtechniques –

and we areincreasingly findingthat member states’border services aretrying to matchthat standard.”

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Alexandria

EdirneSkopje

Nis

Subotica

Serbia

Lomé

Yaoundé

Kinshasa

Algiers

AbidjanAccra

Casablanca

Lagos

Tunis

Istanbul

Nouakchott

Ndjamena

Agadez

Ouagadougou

NiameyBamako

Nioro Du SahelKayes

Banjul

Dakar

Rosso

ZouerateDakhla

Laayoune

Tarfaya Tan-Tan

SidiIfni

Agadir

Cadiz

Ceuta

Malaga

Al Hoceima

Almeria

OranMelilla

Berguent

Marrakech

Magnia

Kano

Gao

Nouadhibou

Arlit

Tamarasset

Dirkou

Al-Qatrum

Sabha

Djanet

Tripoli

Madhia

KelibiaPantelleria

Lampedusa

Annaba

Malta

AssamakaIferouane

Oujda

Spain

Italy

Bulgaria

Greece

Côted'Ivoire Ghana

Liberia

Morocco

BurkinaFasoGuinea

Mali

Mauritania

Senegal

SierraLeone

Cameroon

Libya

Tunisia

Benin

Chad

Niger

Nigeria

Egypt

Turkey

SaudiArabia

Congo

GabonCongo, DRC

Canary Islands

WestSaharanroute

CentralSaharanroute

West Africancoastal route

Rabat

GhardaiaOuargla

Algeria

Nouakchott

St. Luis

Ghat

West Africa – Turkey airto Istambul

Active migration routes

Inactive migration routes

Transit points

New routing

Interviews with migrants can yield vitalintelligence on routes and people-smuggling networksSource: Frontex Quaterly Risk Analysis Q3 2013, www.frontex.europa.eu

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Working as a guest oäcer in someone else’scountry also brings its challenges. Dorte isaccompanied in the mobile oäce by a Greekimmigration oäcer; the principle that Frontexcoordinates support rather than replaces thelocal system is strictly adhered to. “I often askmyself how it would be if a Greek policemancame to Denmark and told me what to do,” shesays, out of earshot of her Greek colleague. “TheGreeks may have diãerent ways of doing things.But it is their way, and that must be respected.It is important to suggest, not tell. And we areall learning. The more we operate together, thebetter we get.”

In Frontex’s Nerve Centre: The Primary Roleof Strategic Risk Analysis

The founding regulation of 2004 requires allFrontex’s work to be intelligence-driven. Theability to spot trends in migratory routes allowsFrontex to anticipate where borders are likely tocome under most pressure – and over the yearssuch foreknowledge has proved vital both forplanning and for the cost-eäcient allocation ofresources.

Of central importance to Frontex, therefore, isthe Risk Analysis Unit, where data is gatheredand turned into useable knowledge, “actionpoints” for distribution both to individual mem-ber states and to Frontex’s operational planners.

As a collection point for data on migrationtrends, RAU is unique. Staãed by some 40people, and with an operating budget of €1.4million a year, RAU collates information frommultiple sources: EU and Schengen countries,open sources, NGOs, UN and EU agencies, in-ternational bodies and oäcers deployed in jointoperations. RAU also processes more sensi-tive data in collaboration with Europol, Interpol,and national risk analysis units fromaround the EU, known as FRAN – the Fron-tex Risk Analysis Network.

“Information-sharing is crucial,” says AntonioSaccone. “We cannot replace the intelligence-gathering operations of member states: that isnot part of our mandate. But we can add valueby processing the information in a diãerent,more holistic way, and coming up with strategicpredictions and passing these back to the mem-ber states, who would not necessarily makethose predictions on their own.”

RAU can also tailor its data to the specific needsof member states engaged in the latest, Fron-tex-planned joint operation – a service that italso conscientiously promotes to other stake-holders.

“We are just one node in a security network. Wecan help other nodes to do their work better,but we are not the brain, and there are limits towhat we can do. Knowing the nature of an im-

“Knowing the natureof an immigration

phenomenon is thestart of managing it– but we are only as

good as theinformation we have,

and information-sharing will always be

a two-way process.”

Antonio Saccone, Frontex RiskAnalysis Unit

The types of craft and theengines used can reveal muchabout the people-smugglingnetworks. Many boats arecriminally unseaworthy

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migration phenomenon is the start of managingit – but we are only as good as the informationwe have, and information-sharing will always bea two-way process,” Saccone underlines.

Frontex’s risk assessment system is of coursenot fool-proof. Like everyone else, RAU waswrong-footed by the Arab Spring revolutions of2011. “We saw no change in migratory patternsthat might have warned us,” says Saccone,

“as we did not have access to the right sourcesof information from the region.” But he remainsconvinced that a longer and broader view ofmigratory trends – as well as of other behaviourpatterns involving, for instance, smuggling and

traäcking – is vital to the planning and execu-tion of the EU’s border security.

At the heart of the Warsaw HQ sits the Fron-tex Situation Centre (FSC), which providesa constant information feed, not only for RAUbut for the whole agency and beyond.

A windowless room filled with computers andwall-sized electronic maps of Europe, FSC hassomething of the atmosphere of the bridge of astate-of-the-art cargo ship. The FSC monitoringteam works 12 hours a day, seven days a week;their mission is to produce a picture of theoverall situation on the frontiers – the EuropeanSituational Picture, or ESP – that is as accurateand up-to-date as possible.

“Our work is governed by what we call the fiverights,” explains the Belgian head of unit, Dirk

Picture below: Newly disembarkedmigrants at Lampedusa. In 2011,the year of the ‘Arab Spring,’ over64,000 migrants arrived on thistiny Italian island

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Cayucos – traditional woodenfishing boats, here seen mooredin Senegal – have been usedfor countless dangerous seacrossings to the Canary Islands

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Van de Ryse. “We aim to provide the right infor-mation to the right place and to the right person,at the right time, in the right format.”

The ever-changing wall maps give the FSCteam a panoramic overview of thecontinent, and what is happening on itsexternal frontiers. On one of these maps, theFSC “dashboard,” recent or significant incidentsaãecting ongoing joint operations flash up asALERT symbols that the operators can zoomin on for more detailed information with thepress of a button. Most of the raw data comesfrom border guards in the field, reporting via anew system known as JORA (Joint OperationsReporting Application), which by 2013 had 1,900users at around 300 border crossing points inaddition to other operational personnel.

JORA has had an important streamlining eãectin the way that incidents arising from Frontexoperations are processed. Before JORA, in 2011,FSC was able to process data from only six ofthe 16 Frontex operations carried out in thatyear. The task took 27 oäcers a total of 808work days. In 2012, by contrast, FSC handled thedata processing of all 17 Frontex operations car-ried out over the year, a task that took just 20oäcers fewer than 138 workdays to complete.

“The change to JORA has certainly been huge…At FSC we talk about the Excel system we usedto use as our ‘mediaeval times,’” Van de Ryseremembers.

The Frontex Situation Centrein Warsaw is manned12 hours a day, seven daysa week

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The FSC map visualisation and dashboard soft-ware allows the team to visualise and “drill down”into the data in new ways, enabling Frontex toquickly answer specific information requestsfrom national border services or other concernedactors: which crossing point detected the moststolen trucks in June? What proportion of theillicit traäc apprehended in the Strait of Gibraltaris connected to drugs? This new data-processingcapability, furthermore, is equally available to allJORA’s users, and this, too, is new – an exercisein the “democratisation of intelligence,” as Vande Ryse puts it. In line with this ethos of acces-sibility, FSC provides services via its online portalFOSS, the Frontex One-Stop-Shop. The numberof registered FOSS users is growing fast: therewere over 4,000 of them by early 2013, and theydownloaded over 8,500 documents every month.

On top of this daily workload, FSC also man-ages data streams for the EU’s integratedsurveillance system, Eurosur — a pan-Europeanplatform linking the bloc’s border authoritiesvia communication nodes to create a compre-hensive situational picture. Since Eurosurcame into use in 2013, FSC has been responsiblefor handling surveillance information, addingdetailed weather forecasts, additional mete-orological data and other services to keep themember states informed.

While JORA provides a ‘live’ data stream foroperations, the analytical work of RAU requires amore advanced tool - CIRAM.

The Common Integrated Risk Analysis Modelwas originally developed by a European CouncilExpert Group in 2002 and was taken over byFrontex in 2005. It has gone through several al-terations since then, although the basic model forcollecting, processing and disseminating informa-tion has been kept intentionally simple.

The most recent development, according to An-tonio Saccone, head of Operational Analysis, hasbeen the adoption of a “management” approachto risk analysis that defines risk in specific termsof “threat, vulnerability and impact.” Say, forexample, Frontex learns that an unusual numberof migrants from a sub-Saharan source coun-try – let us call it ‘Azania’ – have been sightedin a town known as a people-smuggling nexuspoint on the coast of Libya. How serious is this

“threat” – high, medium, or low – and how likely isit that the smugglers will organise a sea crossingto Europe undetected?

Second, how ‘vulnerable’ is the border cross-ing at this point? What are the natural condi-tions? For instance, a rough, winter sea state inthe Mediterranean makes southern Italy lesssusceptible to illegal entry than in the summer.What are the economic and social ‘pull-factors’in Italy compared to, say, Spain? And whatmeans are there in northern Libya for dealingwith this risk before it develops?

And third, what would be the impact – fromcritical to low – if an influx of Azanians took

The Eurosur user interfacepresents border eventsvisually once uploadedby member states

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place? Could an attempted crossing lead to lossof life? Is the receiving border service suäcientlymanned and equipped to cope with the influx?What are the implications for the internal secu-rity of the receiving state, at a given time?

“It’s about the establishment of methodology,”says Saccone. “CIRAM has laid down thecommon indicators of migration and encourag-es member states to describe them in thesame language. For instance, what actu-ally constitutes illegal entry? Diãerent memberstates have diãerent criteria.”

Introducing a common methodology remains awork in progress, in part because diãerent mem-ber states have such diãerent policing prioritiesand risk analysis cultures. Some states havebig teams of well-funded analysts; others havereduced their risk analysis almost to a “one-manunit… it can be very low rent.” RAU has produceda number of publications designed to support theestablishment of CIRAM, including Guidelines forRisk Analysis Units, which are regularly updated.RAU also produces a publicly available AnnualRisk Analysis that delineates trends in migratorypatterns and cross-border criminal activity withthe specific intention of helping member statesprioritise the allocation of resources.

Saccone gives several examples of the practicalapplication of CIRAM. The Canary Islands cayucocrisis of 2006-7, for instance, was largely solvedwhen Spain interceded with fishing authorities

in Mauritania and Senegal to prevent fisher-men from selling their boats or cayucos. “Wewere able to tell the Spanish that the peopleinterested in those boats were almost certainlycriminals, because the local fishing industry wasin crisis, thanks to over-fishing by fleets fromthe Far East.”

On the Italian island of Lampedusa in April 2013,local border authorities reported a sudden in-crease in the numbers of migrants coming fromthe coast near Tripoli – even though Lampedusais three times further from Libya than fromthe coast of Tunisia and that the most popularmigrant departure point from Libya was notTripoli but Benghazi. Why? The reason, RAU wasable to ascertain, was that the local authoritieswere in crisis, and had stopped patrolling. Thedinghies arriving at Lampedusa were all of thesame type, seven metres long, and white – andthey tended to arrive at the same time eachday, a detail pointing to a high level of criminalorganisation.

In 2011, RAU analysis of migrant origins foundthat there were more Algerians trying to reachEurope through Greece than via the traditionalroute directly across Spain. The Greek authori-ties were at first mystified by this apparentanomaly, although the explanation was simple:Turkey’s no-visa policy for the citizens of severalNorth African countries, combined with theavailability of direct flights to Ankara from Casa-blanca on Turkish Airlines.

A cayuco under constructionin Senegal

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More, and Faster:The Focus on ‘Response capacity’

Border crises tend to develop fast.Perhaps the greatest innovation in Frontex’sability to respond to them, therefore, was theestablishment of Rapid Border InterventionTeams, known as RABITs. The principle wasfirst put to the test in 2010 on the Greek-Turkishland border. In the first half of that year, some13,800 illegal border crossings were logged. ByOctober, the flow across the most vulnerablesection of the border, along the River Evros, hadrisen to 350 migrants a day. The Greek authori-ties, overwhelmed by these numbers, turned tothe EU for help.

What was happening in Greece was clearly aEuropean problem, and not just because ofthe numbers appearing at the south-easternborders of the Schengen area. Europe’s commit-ment to the rule of law and fundamental rightsalso needed bolstering. When genuine asylumseekers cannot be identified and separated fromstraightforward economic migrants because theadministrative system is overloaded, the moraland legal foundations upon which the EU standsare called into question.

In response to the Greek request, Frontex wasrequested to deploy RABITs for the first time.Border guards from 26 European countries

came to Greece’s aid, in what became known asJoint Operation RABIT 2010 – the spear-pointof the ongoing regional Operation PoseidonLand. The specialisations of the oäcers de-ployed were varied and included experts in falsedocuments, first and second-line border control,and stolen-vehicle detection. They broughtwith them items of specialist equipment suchas thermo-vision vans (TVVs), helicopters andpatrol vehicles, as well as general logistical andadministrative support including buses, vansand mobile oäces.

Operation RABIT worked: control was restoredand all migrants were processed and recordedin line with procedures. By December 2010, il-legal entries at the Greek-Turkish land borderhad fallen and the operation was extended untilMarch 2011.

Irregular migration from the east was not halted,however. The route later shifted to the Turkish-Bulgarian land border further north, and backto the Greek-Turkish sea borders in the Aegean.Frontex had to respond, and respond quickly.

“We had to react to this somehow,” recalls theagency’s executive director, Ilkka Laitinen. “For-tunately we were prepared and could use theexisting structures.” Frontex again deployedassets, this time to the Bulgarian border, whilethe original Poseidon Sea operation was revivedto cover Greek waters.

A Romanian border patrolon the Greek-Turkishland border

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The RABIT concept was based on a ‘fire-fight-ing’ principle, according to which specialistborder-guard teams were levied from memberstates as the need arose. The achievementsalong the River Evros, however, were temperedby the migrants’ northern route shift, whichdemonstrated a need to have interventionteams on permanent stand-by, to avoid thelogistical and political delays inherent in a sys-tem dependent on ad-hoc requests to memberstates. This was one of the issues addressed ina 2011 amendment to the regulation that al-lowed Frontex to establish a permanent pool ofborder guard specialists from around the EU onwhich they could draw. European Border GuardTeams were born.

The RABIT members were among the oäcers in-corporated into European Border Guard Teams,or EBGTs. After EBGT selection, border guardsreceive specialist training from Frontex.Thirteen job ‘profiles’ were identified, rangingfrom border surveillance to false document de-tection and detection of stolen vehicles.

The changing of the guard –guest oícers change shiftin the Evros region of Greece

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The original plan was to have 1,850 well-trainedspecialists ready for deployment, although thattarget has been well surpassed: in September2013, Frontex had almost 2,500 EBGT-registeredborder guards on its books. But on top of thestandard pool were a handful of experts cherry-picked to become a new breed of border guard

– Seconded Guest Oäcers (SGOs).

With the introduction of this new categoryof guest oäcer the maximum posting wasextended from one to six months, giving themtime where necessary to learn the particulari-ties of their posting. Frontex is now authorisedto deploy these SGOs wherever they are needed,whereas previously the destination of a guestoäcer was the subject of potentially lengthynegotiations with the national border servicethey came from. And, thanks to the criteria laidout by the EBGT training programme, there isnow a greater degree of consistency in the qual-

ity of the guards deployed in joint operations.And though the first batch of SGOs was small, itis an instrument expected to grow in the yearsto come.

A measure of the pooling system’s success, ac-cording to Rustamas Liubajevas, the head ofthe Pooled Resources Unit (PRU) at Frontex,has been the establishment of a palpable espritde corps among EBGT members – a spirit thatLiubajevas carefully fosters. “I went to an annualEBGT day in Sweden recently, and there was astrong feeling among the attendees that theywere privileged to be there,” he says.

“The real point of pooling is the flexibility itbrings,” says Liubajevas. “We had to have thatbecause the situation on the borders itself is sofluid.” PRU’s role is principally logistical. Organ-ising who and what goes where is a complextask. “We can’t give the member states orders,”

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Liubajevas explains, “but we can direct themthrough ‘soft’ measures such as the identifica-tion of standard operating procedures.” Main-taining a dialogue with the member states iscritical. And to help manage the assets, PRUhave developed a new IT system, an ‘e-platform’known as OPERA.

PRU’s role is not confined to the allocation ofpersonnel. Each year, the Frontex ManagementBoard sets the minimum quantity and type ofassets – vehicles, aircraft, vessels and otherequipment – to be contributed by each memberstate, and operational requirements are set inconsultation with the Joint Operations Unit.EU recession neither diminished the continent’sappeal to migrants, nor dimmed an appreciationin European capitals that the Schengen systemis unworkable without secure exterior borders.

“Joint Operations are completely diãerent com-pared to ten years ago,” says Liubajevas (whohas worked for Frontex since 2005). “There ismuch more trust among the member statesnow, and much more willingness to cooperate.”

Although Frontex is empowered to acquire itsown equipment when necessary, rather thanbeing forced to rely on the goodwill of themember states for hardware, it wasn’t until 2013that PRU launched its first targeted acquisi-tion project, which involved buying in supportservices for aerial surveillance. “It is possiblein future that operational gaps will be filled byFrontex-leased assets – although our budgets

for now remain very small,” says Liubajevas.Until then, all assets remain the property of themember states contributing them.

In May 2013, the coastguard patrols oã Lesvoswere assisted by a thermo-vision van deployedvia Frontex, but belonging to and manned bythe Slovenian border service. Stationed for eighthours each night on the cliãs above Lepetimnos,overlooking an 8 km stretch of sea betweenGreece and Turkey, the van’s roof-mountedinfrared cameras are capable of picking out adinghy long before it has reached EU waters;the heat signature-spotting capability of thistechnology has the added advantage that itis unaãected by fog. Any suspicious activitydetected is quickly passed back to Hellenic CoastGuard HQ in Piraeus via a Greek liaison oäcerworking alongside the Slovenes, as well as di-rectly to the boat crews patrolling below, buyingprecious time for them to arrive on station.

The crew of the Slovene TVV, one of 12 formerlyused to patrol the land border with Croatia,recall how they drove the vehicle all the wayto Lesvos from Ljubljiana, and how scared theywere of something happening to it on the road.The TVVs look like ordinary transit vans whentheir cameras are packed away, yet they costas much as €500,000 each. The greatestchallenge of their work, they say, is stayingalert throughout the long nights.

Every patrol ismeticulously planned

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There are periods of boredom in this kind ofsurveillance work. But Michael Dimou, the Greekliaison oäcer, is not in doubt about its impor-tance to the hard-pressed coast guard, who ineãect can leave policing this stretch of the coastto the guest oäcers from Slovenia.

TVVs, despite their high capital cost, haveproved economically as well as operationallyeäcient in joint operations; their use is likely togrow in future. According to Julian Quiles, theFrontex oäcer responsible for Operation Posei-don Sea, the increasing use of TVVs since 2005has been driven as much by economic necessityas by proof of their eäcacy. “There has been adefinite change in how and what we deploy –for example, from expensive air assets towardsland-based surveillance platforms, which areultimately far more cost-eäcient. We havehad to evolve our modus operandi for practicalreasons... Adaptation is central to all we do atFrontex.”

“We learnt a lot from the RABIT deployment,”Liubajevas insists. “It was the first and last of itstype and although we’d run regular deploymentexercises there’s nothing like the real thing. Youjust don’t know what the reality is till it happens.The cyclical process of evaluation and feedingback lessons learnt into operational planningis something that really pays oã over time. It’show best practice is distilled.”

“...”The cyclical processof evaluationand feedingback lessons learntinto operationalplanning is somethingthat really pays oãover time. It’s how bestpractice is distilled.”

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tion. But it was not until the Eurosur Regulationof 2013 that Frontex was formally tasked withmaking it happen.

Interoperability, in Vourekas’s view, has beenthe key to establishing the new spirit of coop-eration. “The concept begins with the ex-change of information,” says Vourekas.

“When information is shared, a relationshipof trust begins.”

Until the mid-2000s, member state expertise inborder control was jealously guarded; the nub ofFrontex’s achievement is that it is now pooled.

“We asked the member states for their special-ists, and clustered them, to their home countries’mutual advantage. That is the key to the inter-operability principle. Mutual trust unlocks jointpotential, and brings huge cost savings in termsof staäng and asset allocation.”

The collection, collation and redistribution ofdata from joint operations at the borders viathe JORA system and the new Frontex SituationCentre dashboard – the screen of which is openon his desktop computer as we speak – are, hesays, a prime example of interoperability in ac-tion: a powerful analytical tool that is alreadyassisting the EPN, the maritime EuropeanPatrols Network that polices the Mediterraneanand Black Sea year-round.

The EPN has started developing a common real-time video system as well as a secure telecoms

Streamlining the System: Why‘Interoperability’ Matters

When Frontex began its mission, there was as-tonishingly little international cooperation in thesphere of external border control. “It wasn’t justinternational cooperation that was lacking in theearly days,” recalls Georgios Vourekas, head ofthe Sea Borders Sector, who joined Frontex in itsnascent years. “We also had to deal with internalrivalries among member state authorities.”

A Frontex study, MEDSEA in 2006, found thatamong the eight EU countries along the Medi-terranean seaboard, responsibility for maritimeissues was shared by 30 government ministriesand 50 diãerent authorities. “There were nostandard operating procedures regarding bordercontrol. The technologies used by the memberstates overlapped, or were incompatible. It waschaos – and it wasn’t sustainable.”

Frontex was not the first organisation to iden-tify the problem. The seeds of a pan-Europeanborder surveillance information-exchangesystem, later dubbed Eurosur, were already be-ing planted in Brussels before Frontex was evenlaunched.

The Eurosur concept, still embryonic at thatstage, relied entirely on information sharingon a common platform combining commonsystems; the essence of interoperability in ac-

“It is like dancinga ballet:

putting one stepwrong can

spell disaster.”

Georgios Vourekas,head of Sea Borders Sector,

Warsaw

Air assets play a critical rolein detections at sea

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system in line with existing technology in themember states. It has also experimented witha common satellite-positioning system, theFrontex Positioning System or FPS, “so wealways know where the assets are.” Opera-tional budgeting and planning has been greatlyenhanced by FPS, which incorporates a financialtracking system that continually calculates thedeployment costs of an asset, even while it ison operation. “The EPN concept is based on asuccessful model of regional cooperation that isbeing studied by the US Coast Guard for applica-tion in the Gulf of Mexico,” Vourekas adds.

It is, of course, not easy to ensure cooperationbetween member states. “It is like dancing a bal-let: putting one step wrong can spell disaster,”says Vourekas. Frontex, he points out, is a tinyorganisation for the task it has been set. “Justlook at NATO. They have an entire directorate, athousand people, working on the administrationof the STANAG [Standardisation Agreement].Yet I run my oäce with a staã of 20 – can youimagine? That is a big challenge.”

The coordination of physical assets is, of course,only one part of Frontex’s role. The successfulapplication of the interoperability principle alsorequires good human relationships between themember states’ authorities – and it is perhapsin this regard that the agency really adds value.Frontex has emerged not just as a nexus forborder guard expertise, but also as a unique

Frontex hasemerged notjust as a nexusfor border guardexpertise, but alsoas a uniqueforum for theexchange of ideasand experience:a place wherethe communitycan forgeprofessionalrelationships.

Guest speakers at Frontex’sflagship annual event: theEuropean Day for Border Guards

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forum for the exchange of ideas and experience:a place where the community can forge profes-sional relationships, in short. The EuropeanDay for Border Guards (ED4BG), for example,organised in the second half of May each year byFrontex in Warsaw, has become a popular datein the border guard calendar.

Such specialist conferences, Frontex has found,provide valuable forums for the exchange ofexperience and new techniques and serve as animportant crucible in the search for excellence.

Ties within the informal, social Frontex networkare strengthening all the time, with impor-tant consequences for EU border operationsin general. As Frontex’s Border Guard BasicTraining manual puts it: “Border guards’ humaninteroperability can be seen in two dimensions…In its traditional (narrow) meaning, borderguards must be able to work together on jointoperations, side by side. In the often forgottenmeaning in a wider sense, all border guards areworking together even when they are carryingout their own work at their own border posts.”

Interoperability is, in part, about the establish-ment of an esprit de corps. International friend-ships are struck every time Frontex deploys anexpert from one member state to another toprovide additional support – and they take backwith them, and are likely to absorb, the newmethods and ideas they have seen.

“In this way, capacity-building and the sharing ofknowledge and best practices become automat-ic,” says Antonio Saccone, head of OperationalAnalysis in the Risk Analysis Unit. “It is not evenseen by the oäcers themselves at the time.It is a body of joint knowledge whichgrows all the time, and so makes the borderguards more eãective. Best practice is nowsnowballing.”

“In this way,capacity-buildingand the sharingof knowledge andbest practicesbecomeautomatic,”

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Picture below: Guest oícersahead of another busy day onthe Hungarian land border

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On any day in Europe:

At the Air Border

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Lisbon airport,September 2013

It is 5.45 am, but the guest oäcers on the earlyfirst-line shift at Lisbon airport have been up foran hour already, preparing to receive passengersfrom the first flight of the morning, due in anyminute from Guinea-Bissau. They are here as apart of Joint Action Lusitania, a two-week oper-ation closely focused on document fraud. Some95 percent of all document fraud in Portugal isdetected at this airport – there were 631 casesin 2012, out of a passenger total of 14 million –and the vast majority of them involved WestAfricans, above all from the troubled formerPortuguese colony of Guinea-Bissau.

The starkly-lit arrivals concourse does notremain empty for long. “Get ready. Here theycome,” says Jan Karl Hoilund, a Danish policeoäcer seconded to Frontex, as, far down theechoing hallway, a pair of glass doors hisses openand the first wave of passengers appears, surgingout towards passport control. The oäcers, fourof them, spread out in a line that seems improb-ably thin. The jokes and joshing of a few minutesago are suddenly forgotten. There will likely beat least one passenger from this flight attempt-ing to enter Europe on false papers. So far duringLusitania, the border guards have interceptedbetween three and five fraudsters every day.

The first case is uncovered in less than ten min-utes: a young man with a Senegalese passport

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tographs, imposters using stolen documents: thepermutations of deception are almost limitless.

Senior Deputy-Inspector Rui Melro, of the SEF’s140-strong airport team, shows me a collectionof fake Mexican passports recovered from agroup of Chinese passengers whose unusualtravel itinerary had aroused his oäcers’ sus-picions: they appeared to be travelling fromMorocco via Lisbon to Haiti. Belonging to asmuggling gang who specialized in slipping falsedocuments to clients transiting through Lisbon,the passports were found concealed in a hol-lowed-out copy of a novel by Paulo Coelho, andwrapped in such a way as to evade detection byx-ray machinery. The variety of tricks applied inthis business is, says Melro, “staggering.”

Air operations like this one, explains NunoLadeiro, a Portuguese oäcer working forFrontex’s air borders sector, are always short:Lusitania is scheduled to last for just two weeks.This is largely because it never takes long fornews of the extra passport checks to get back tothe facilitators, who are adept at adjusting theirroutes, and techniques, to evade detection.

The early morning is the busiest time for Lisbonairport. The queue for passport control, visiblethrough the plate glass window of the SEF oäce’ssecond-line interview area, almost fills the arrivalshall. In the passport booths, Portuguese oäc-ers work side-by-side with those deployed in theframework of the Frontex-coordinated joint action.

that was issued in Gambia, even though, he says,he was born in Guinea-Bissau. He produces aPortuguese residency permit, cartão de residên-cia – and yet it quickly becomes apparent thathe doesn’t speak a word of Portuguese. His airticket, moreover, is one-way from Africa.If he lived in Portugal, as he claims to, his ticketwould most likely be the second part of a return.

A magnifying glass, produced from one of theoäcer’s pockets, seals the young man’s fate:the residency permit is a fake. It looks fineto the naked eye, but under magnification thedetails of the background printing show signsthat it has been produced using an ink-jetprinter. The suspect Senegalese/Gambian/Gui-nean is courteously but firmly escorted to thenearby oäces of SEF, the Serviço de Estrangeiros eFronteiras, for processing. “There are many ques-tions about this man that we will likely never beable to answer, but from here on it’s purely anadministrative matter,” says Hoilund. “He will bepassed to the immigration authorities and – ifhe does not claim asylum – refused entry.”

The heart of the SEF oäces is the ‘labora-tory,’ which contains an array of microscopes,multi-wavelength light readers and otherspecialist equipment necessary in the detectionof forgery. The lab’s proudest possession is its ex-tensive collection of fraudulent documentsintercepted at the airport, which are kept tohand both for reference and for training purposes.Counterfeit visas, forged passports, doctored pho-

A Portuguese document expert appliesultraviolet light to a suspected falsepassport. The variety of tricks usedby forgers is ‘staggering’

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Portugal’s membership of Schengen has turnedtheir airport into one of the EU’s front linesin dealing with irregular migration flows. Aselsewhere on Europe’s external borders, thisappears to be on the increase at Lisbon, wherethe number of fraudulent documents seized hasrisen in each of the last three years.

Migrants to Lisbon traditionally came fromformer Portuguese colonies – Brazil, Angola,Mozambique and Cape Verde, as well as Guinea-Bissau – but the area they come from is far wid-er now. And though most arrivals are routine,irregular migrants arrive from Eastern Europe,from Asia, and from all over Africa (particularly,during the Arab Spring, from the Maghreb).

“This is the entrance to the Netherlands, righthere,” says one Portuguese oäcer. But he hasno regrets or misgivings about this. Indeed, hethought that Schengen was, “the greatest thingto have happened to Europe in half a century.”

Their workload is greatly assisted by technol-ogy. Automisation, the guards all agree, has ledto enormous changes in the way the borderis managed. Even in the first line, passportdetails once had to be entered into the nationaldatabase by typewriter; these days the data isuploaded using scanners and auto-fill software.A bank of electronic border gates is also popu-lar for helping to reduce pressure in the mainqueue. The self-service system, according toMelro, can reduce passport processing time tojust seven seconds per passenger.

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“I call it the electronic border,” says Ladeiro. “I ampro-IT but we are still very far from a point wheremachines can replace people in this job, as somepeople think. It is important to strike the rightbalance between machines and eyes-on.”

Joint Action Lusitania, and the presence of extraguest oäcers, seems genuinely popular withthe SEF men, and not only because extra staãare useful when things are busy. “At air bordersit is vital to have good relations betweenall the services,” says Valentijn Schoofs, a Bel-gian expert on passport forgery. “And Frontexexchange programmes, or joint actions like thisone, are brilliant for creating those.”

Back in the SEF oäce, another forgery suspect isbrought in, this time oã a flight from Senegal. TheSchengen visa his passport contains is a real one.But, under the lab’s microscope there are tell-talesigns that the original has been erased and re-imaged. The new photograph corresponds to theone on the passport’s personal data page, but that,too, is a substitute for the original. It is likely thatthis passport has been used before, by anotherperson attempting to enter Europe. “Talk aboutrecycling!” says Jan Karl Hoilund. “The problem isthat we have no idea who this guy really is.”

It is a common enough occurrence at Lisbonairport, which, through accident of geography,looks certain to remain one of the busiest illegalentry points into Europe from Africa in the yearsto come.

Lisbon airport, where 95%of all document fraud in Portugalis detected: over 600 casesin 2012 alone

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Fron

tex,

2011

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Background

If the early years of Frontex were partly anexercise in identifying where and how such anorganisation could add value, the later oneshave been a period of consolidation, of buildingup diãerent areas of expertise. Frontex todaygroups specialists in such varied fields as coun-ter-forgery, border surveillance, dog-handling,stolen car tracking, countering the smugglingand traäcking of people, border guard training,and the research, development and applicationof new technologies on our borders. The follow-ing section explores progress in these special-isms in greater detail.

Frontex today:

A Treasury of Best Practice2Frontex today groups specialists

in such varied fields as counter-forgery,

border surveillance, dog-handling,

stolen car tracking, countering

the smuggling and traäcking

of people, border guard training,

and the research, development

and applicationof new technologieson our borders.

An Italian Coast Guard plane setsoì on a surveillance missionfrom the Italian islandof Lampedusa

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Air & Naval Crew Training,Lampedusa, 2009. Border guardslearn about night operationsand night-vision goggles

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Training

Rainer Brenner, a Senior Training Oäcer atFrontex, began his career in 1988 with the Ger-man Federal Police, as a border guard on theIron Curtain that used to split his country in two.

“If someone had said to me then that one daythere would be no borders at all within Europe,I’d have said ‘go and see a doctor,’” he says. AFrontex staãer since 2006, Brenner these daysis a passionate champion of the Common CoreCurriculum (CCC), the training cornerstone for EUborder guards everywhere.

Basic training, he says, is the foundation of ca-pacity-building, the bedrock of interoperability:

“Our goal is to create a European border-serviceculture of the highest quality possible, with har-monised standards and operating procedures,and which applies those high standards equallyeverywhere. Training is key. It is what makesjoint operations possible.”

There is also, he insists, a strong supra-politicaldimension to his job. “Border guards do far morethan just check passports. For me, it is a ques-tion of humanity to help people if necessary;my role is to make sure border guards have theright attitude to the job. A border guard is likean ambassador for humanity, the first person atraveller sees when they arrive in Europe.”The CCC pre-dates Frontex: it was first endorsedin 2003 by the EU Council of Ministers. The first

A border guardis like anambassadorfor humanity,the first person atraveller sees whenthey arrive inEurope.”

version was “pretty rudimentary” according toBrenner. It has been updated twice since, mostrecently in 2012 under Frontex supervision, andin published form it now runs to some 270pages. Its length perhaps testifies to the com-plexity and surprising variety of skills required ofdiãerent border guards, from mountain rescuetechniques to human rights awareness.

“Frontex,” Brenner makes clear, “does not inprinciple train border guards on behalf of themember states. Our role is to define the stand-ards and develop the training, but it is up tothe member states to implement them withintheir national systems. Only in rare cases do wetrain ‘end users’ directly, such as members of theEuropean Border Guard Teams.”

By applying the so-called ‘multiplier’ approach– by which, after training, border guards returnto their member states to act as local trainersand pass on their new skills or knowledge – aswell as by providing translated versions of thevarious training tools, Frontex ensures that allborder guard oäcers have access to relevantlearning in their mother tongue in a harmonised,pan-European manner.

The training unit does, however, organise some200 ‘training activities’ a year, interfacing with apan-European network of ‘partnership acad-emies.’ These are also run along the ‘train thetrainer’ principle but are directed towards EBGTmembers to ensure interoperability.

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Qualifications are graded, from basic standardsthrough to mid-level training that may includespecialist skills, such as dog handling, stolenvehicle identification, or language training. Mid-level training is targeted at shift leaders, unitcommanders and similar ranks. Meanwhile, ahigher qualification is also possible via a JointMasters in Strategic Border Management, formore senior oäcers. Set in motion by the EUpolicies of life-long learning, the professionalqualifications gained in one EU country must bevalid and recognisable in every other memberstate. “It is obviously vital for interoperabilitythat border guard qualifications are comparablethroughout the EU,” says Brenner.

Under the Schengen Accord, member states re-main responsible for policing their stretch of ex-ternal border. Under the EU’s SchEval (SchengenEvaluation) mechanism, therefore, the borderservices of states hoping to join Schengen arecarefully assessed before they can join and aremonitored regularly afterwards. The standard ofborder service in existing Schengen members isalso carefully and continuously monitored. Since2009, at the request of the EU Council of Minis-ters, voiced by the Working Party for SchengenMatters, Frontex has been closely involved inthe training of the evaluators. “They realisedthat they had no set of common standardsagainst which they could objectively comparethe performance of applicant and participatingstates,” explains Brenner. “It is vital that who-ever conducts the evaluation, and wherever it is

“In the end,the successof Schengenis dependenton the qualityof its externalborder control.”

carried out, the standards applied, and thereforethe results, will always be consistent.”

Learning how to evaluate a border service ob-jectively is an arduous task. The course includestwo and a half days of theoretical training fo-cusing on how to evaluate objectively, followedby a two-and-a-half-day mock evaluation at anactual BCP, all under the eyes of other train-ers and mentors; the trainees are also taughtadministration procedures, such as how to drafta report to the Council of Ministers. “This is stilla work in progress,” acknowledges Brenner. “Weare still building up the pool of qualified evalu-ators. But it is essential work. In the end, thesuccess of Schengen is dependent on the qualityof its external border control.”

Sea survival trainingfor border guards,Meriturva, Finland

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Stolen vehicle specialists deployedby Frontex assist the authoritieson the Slovenian frontier. Some1.2m cars are stolen in Europeevery year

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Car theft

There are some 250 million cars on the roadsof Europe, about a quarter of all the cars in theworld. Of the 60 million new cars manufacturedevery year, furthermore, almost a third are builtin the EU. Europe has one of the highest densi-ties of vehicles per capita in the world; WesternEurope has the highest proportion of ‘premiermarque’ cars. As one of the most conspicuoussymbols of prosperity, cars have alwaysbeen targeted by thieves. Some 1.2 million ofthem, worth an estimated €6 billion on theblack market, are stolen every year; and some30 to 40 percent of these vehicles are stolen toorder, by international criminal gangs.

Eãorts to combat car theft, including by Frontex,caused the overall level of car crime in the EU todecrease by 23 percent between 2007 and 2010.In Bulgaria, however, it increased by 8 percent,and in Romania by 39 percent. Even with theoverall drop in the EU, in other words, interna-tional car theft remains a massive and success-ful criminal enterprise.

Like migrant-smuggling gangs, trans-bordercar thieves also have their preferred routes anddestinations, but are just as clever at adaptingtheir modus operandi to stay one step aheadof the authorities. For instance, the thieves nolonger target the expensive premier brands asthey used almost exclusively to do. In France in

“It’s not like the olddays, when you couldbreak into a car with

a coat hanger andhot-wire

the ignition with yourfingers.”

Isaac de Toro Mezquita,counter-car-theft specialist

2012, a sharp uptick in the theft of medium-classcompact cars was reported.

The eastward expansion of the EU from 2004gave international car thieves vastly more op-portunities. Europol statistics show the maindestinations for stolen cars in 2012 were Russia,Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Belarus. The mainroute was the border between Poland andUkraine, followed by the southern route intothe Western Balkans. German makes such asVolkswagen, Mercedes and BMW were the mostfrequently targeted. Although a third, new route,principally for luxury cars, has opened up intoNorth Africa from Spain, the clandestine exportof stolen vehicles is a crime detected chiefly atthe eastern EU borders, according to Isaac deToro Mezquita, who joined Frontex in 2008 andhas worked on developing training for the EU’sborder guard response ever since.

A former military policeman with Spain’s GuardiaCivil, Mezquita’s expertise in vehicles dates fromthe 1990s, when he was co-located with theSerbian police in Bosnia, as a part of the UN-mandated International Police Training Force.His experience there taught him how to spotcar bombs as well as stolen vehicles. He explainshow, as car defence systems have grown moresophisticated, thieves have become ever moretechnically adept at circumventing them. Thethieves have developed software, easily deliver-able through a laptop, that can overcome the

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car manufacturers’ immobilisers and encryptioncodes. Sophisticated skeleton keys are readilyavailable on the internet. “It’s not like the olddays, when you could break into a car with acoat hanger and hot-wire the ignition with yourfingers.”

The main technique for identifying a stolen vehi-cle at the border is surprisingly old-fashioned: itdepends on a border guard’s ability to locate itsunique Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) fromits engine block or chassis, and match it againstexisting databases of stolen vehicles. “Nationaldatabases exist, but there is no mega, EU-widedatabase that border guards can access quicklyand easily enough,” says Mezquita.

Frontex’s most important contribution to thefight against car crime has probably been thedevelopment of standardised training: essen-tially, what to look for when trying to identifya stolen car, and how to find it. In the earlydays, Frontex ran its own training programmes,which produced two or three specialists inindividual member states. But it was clear fromthe start that this system would never produceenough specialists fast enough. The costs oftraining directly the kinds of numbers neededwere simply too great for an organisation likeFrontex to bear.

The solution was a new training tool known asAdesvet (Advanced Detection of Stolen VehiclesTraining). Since June 2013, Adesvet has beendownloadable from the internet – althoughnot by the general public: the information itcontains is encrypted, and disseminated downto the national level, via locally secured intran-ets, on the ‘need to know’ principle. Adesvetcontains basic information on, for example,where to find the VIN on a particular car model,and how to read it. Constantly updated, it alsocontains more sensitive details of, for instance,organised criminals’ latest concealment tech-niques.

Great care has been taken to make Adesvetuser-friendly, to encourage busy borderguards to access it in the field: “It’s wiki-style. That’s my philosophy,” says Mezquita.Like Wikipedia, the quality of Adesvet’s datadepends on the contributions of its users: a col-laborative approach that is intended to be self-sustaining. “My budget this year was €200,000,and there is no guarantee of any budget at all inthe future,” says Mezquita, “so we were forcedto design a system that can perpetuate itself.”

A key issue, Mezquita found, was that of lan-guage: “Our early training programmes wereonly in English. But if a border guard doesn’t

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A border guard uses Adesvetto check a suspect vehicle

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speak English, they quickly lose interest andwon’t use Adesvet as they should. This system ismuch better.”

As well as being user-powered and multilingual,Adesvet also has the advantage that it workson the multiplier principle under which theresponsibility for training up more stolen vehiclespecialists rests with member states rather thanwith Warsaw. And the evidence suggests thatAdesvet is indeed working. Europe-wide, some5,000 border guards were trained usingAdesvet in 2012. In Croatia alone in that year, theextra training led to the detection of 147 stolenvehicles. The training is entirely paid for by themember states themselves: Frontex’s contri-bution is restricted to the provision of trainerswhere necessary.

Cheap and self-sustaining, Adesvet has wonsupport in some unlikely places, including inBritain, where stolen vehicles are considered apolice matter, not a border guard one. Yet theBritish police, Mezquita points out, have askedFrontex to cooperate with the British borderservice, and ACPO (the Association of Chief Po-lice Oäcers) in Coventry has requested accessto Adesvet.

“Adesvet is up and running, and I think will still berunning long after I’ve gone,” says Mezquita. “I’mvery proud of that achievement.”

Over a million cars are stolenin the EU every year

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Counterfeiting

Despite many advances in passport technology inrecent years – and particularly since 9/11, whichled to a heightening of all security measures –document fraud remains a serious prob-lem at the external borders of, and also within,the EU and Schengen area. For example, in 2012a total of 3,171 cases of fraudulent passports wererecorded at the external border, with French andBritish passports being targeted the most. Inaddition, 2,132 cases of fraudulent visas/residencepermits were detected, particularly those issuedby France or Greece. Fraudulent documents tendto be mostly detected at airports (56 percent)being used by travellers arriving from a very widerange of departure airports in third countries,followed by land borders (39 percent) particularlyfrom Ukraine and Albania, where counterfeitborder-crossing stamps are frequently used tofabricate travel histories and extend periods ofstay.

The threats that document fraud present aremulti-faceted. Firstly, document fraud poten-tially enables criminals and terrorists to enterand then move freely within the Schengen area,with obvious implications for the security of itsmember states; and secondly, it bolsters blackmarkets and leads to the abuse of social servicesin the countries where migrants with false iden-tities eventually settle. Ultimately, document

“Biometric technologyhas made passports

much harderand more expensive

to forge.But still – anything

can be forged.A good

document forgeris like a great artist.”

Nuno Ladeiro, project managerof the reference manual

fraud limits the ability of any state to eãectivelymanage its legitimate communities.

Until very recently, there was no EU-levelanalysis of document fraud trends. To addressthis gap, in early 2012, Frontex established theEuropean Union Document-Fraud Risk AnalysisNetwork (EDF-RAN). Much work was initiallydone to standardise terms and definitions usedin the complex field of document fraud. Now,specialists from 29 countries meet periodicallyto exchange detailed standardised data and in-telligence to describe detection points, national-ities of migrants, routes taken, documents usedand – especially – the latest forgery techniques.

The reference manual project focusing on forgedand counterfeit documents has been led since2007 by Nuno Ladeiro, a deputy inspector ofborder guards seconded from Portugal.

“In 2007, we were still developing our own forms,and were very limited in what we could achieve,”he recalls. The turning point – Ladeiro calls it,

“the beginning of a snowball” – was OperationHammer, a “framework joint operation” concen-trated on airports that lasted for five monthsover the winter of 2008.

Frontex joint support teams were deployed to189 locations, including 115 airports. “Thanks tothe Frontex regulation, migration was the firstarea of operations where it became legal for an

Frontex provides specialist skillswhere they are most needed atEurope’s borders

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detected being usedto enter the EU/Schengen area in 2013

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EU police oäcer to exert authority in a mem-ber state other than his own,” says Ladeiro. Avast amount of knowledge was gained – andsubsequently shared – particularly pertaining tothe preference of smugglers for the EU’s smallerairports, and the significant role played by low-cost airlines. Some 760 irregular migrants weredetected, and 71 cases of document fraud.

Document fraud, statistics show, is often mostprevalent in societies where law and orderhas broken down the most – which typicallymeans from countries recovering from, or stillaåicted by, armed conflict. Hence OperationHammer was preceded by the smaller Opera-tion Zarathustra, which spotlighted air arrivalsfrom Central Asia, and by the 14-nation Opera-tion Zorba, another air operation focused onthe Western Balkans, in 2010. Operation Silenceconcentrated on documents of passengers fromthe Horn of Africa, and Operation Longstopon those from Sri Lanka. The lessons of theseoperations, culminating in Operation Hammer,which proved Frontex’s ability to deploy guestoäcers to pressure points at short notice with ahigh level of international cooperation, are nowbeing applied Europe-wide, according to Ladeiro.

“It is a new concept, this mega-cooperation ofjoint operations. But there is a need for it.”

The year 2008 saw the publication of the firstever documentation reference manual, a DVDthat attempts to archive all the forms of identi-fication used by travellers around the world. It

has been constantly updated ever since, and by2013 contained around 9,000 diãerent docu-ments and stamps, and ran to a thousand pages.

“Most countries have at least three types of pass-port,” explains Nuno Ladeiro. “Some countrieshave 30 types of driving licence. And residencepermits are a world in themselves. Trying tokeep a library like this up to date is a full-timejob that will likely never be complete – althoughI think we are 80 percent of the way there now.”

Tools like this manual do exist at the nationallevel, while the EU has operated an image-archiving system, FADO (False and AuthenticDocuments Online), since the late 1990s. Fron-tex’s achievement is to have exploited theseassets in order to create something new. “Theadded value is in the exchange of data and inmaking that data far more accessible to borderguards on the front line,” says Ladeiro, addingthat the Frontex database is used, “everywhere,right down to street cops on highway patrol.”There are also plans to distribute the manual toborder services outside the EU.

The process of standardising EU passports, andimproving their safeguards, is an ongoing one.For instance, in the past a special transparentlayer was widely used to cover vital data on apaper substrate, but it transpired that this waseasily opened and therefore far from tamper-proof. The photograph remains the key. Thesedays the image is generally burned onto the

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15%

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substrate by laser, so it can not be replaced ortampered with, although this means of identi-fication can still be circumvented. During the2000s there was a marked increase in ‘look-alike’ fraud, often involving stolen passports.This, according to Ladeiro, illustrates the grow-ing professionalism of the people smugglers

– because it takes an extensive and well-organ-

ised network to match up the image in a stolenpassport with a would-be impostor.

New technology has proved a particularlycritical tool in counter-fraud.In consultation with Frontex, Interpol andnational border services, passport technologyis constantly being developed. At major airports,travellers are already familiar with ABC (Auto-mated Border Control) gates, and are growingused to presenting their e-passports (passportscontaining a chip).

But, says Ladeiro, while today’s e-passportscontain digitised biometrics in the form of facialimages or fingerprint, they still have the familiar

‘paper’ format. As security threats continuallychange with new technology, the future mayone day see digital passports, perhaps as a mo-bile app or a credit-card-sized electronic device.

“Ten years ago we were seeing passports withthe name scratched out and overwritten byhand, or false photographs glued in any oldhow,” says Ladeiro. “It’s a diãerent world today.Biometric technology has made passports muchharder and more expensive to forge, which hasput the business more in the hands of organisedcriminal networks. But still – anything can beforged. A good document forger is like a greatartist.”

Picture below: ElectronicMicroscopy is a key tool in thedetection of document forgery

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Human Trafficking

Traäcking in Human Beings, or THB, is a deeplyemotive issue everywhere. The victims tend tobe the weakest and most vulnerable – youngwomen, children, the very poor. In the EU, a highmedia profile and widespread public concernhave made the eradication of this darkest oftrades a priority for Europe’s leaders. In 2011, theEuropean Commission launched a new strategyfor the years 2012-2016 with a directive designedto improve detection rates, increase prosecu-tions, enhance cooperation among law enforce-ment agencies, and a number of other measures.

A key problem in the campaign against THB,however – one that has also been identified byEuropol – is the lack of accurate data on thetrade, without which it has proved very diäcultto strategise eãectively. Spotting a traäckingvictim at the border is notoriously diäcult. Theline between people-traäcking and people-smuggling – the diãerence being that smug-glers are paid to get people across borders whiletraäckers seek to exploit them afterwards – isoften a fine one. One well-publicised instanceoccurred in Portugal in 2004 when police foundthat forced labourers were being smuggled infrom Africa to work on seven new stadiums thathad to be finished in a great hurry ahead of theUEFA European Football Championship. It isalso often the case that traäcking starts with

Spottinga traäcking victimat the borderis notoriouslydiäcult. The linebetween people-traäcking andpeople-smuggling... is often a fine one.

smuggling and migrants may only later find outthe truth about their smugglers.

At one of the many border guard conferencesthat Frontex organises, an Italian oäcer re-ported a recent uptick in very young childrenbeing traäcked from Africa. These babies, theoäcer said, were often heavily sedated beforearriving at border control. He and his colleagueshad learnt how to spot the signs of sedation –the use of a pram was usually the first indicator

– and now, whenever suspicious, request thatthe ‘mother’ wakes up her child before lettingthem pass.

When the victims of traäcking are them-selves unaware that they are the victims ofcrime – even after they have reached their finaldestinations, or in the case of very small children

– many instances of THB naturally go undetec-ted. This means that no one knows for sure howmany people are traäcked each year. But it isa global problem. The United Nations Oäce onDrugs and Crime’s 2012 Global Report of Traýck-ing in Persons noted that worldwide, victims of136 nationalities were detected in 118 countriesbetween 2007 and 2010. At the global level,traäcking for the purpose of sexual exploitationaccounted for 58 percent of all traäcking casesdetected, while traäcking for forced labour 36percent. For Europe and Central Asia, though,the percentage of sex-trade victims was re-ported to be 62 percent (and the proportion of

For many victims of traícking,a border guard may be the onlyrepresentative of the law theywill ever encounter. The bestpossible training in THBdetection is therefore crucial

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The word prote-ction comes firstfor a reason —the victimcomes first.

Source: UNODC,Traícking in Persons to Europe for Sexual Exploitation, www.unodc.org

ESTIMATED VALUE OF THBFOR SEXUAL EXPLOITATION IN EUROPE

€2.5 billionPER YEAR

ESTIMATED NUMBER OF VICTIMS:

170 000

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forced labour victims correspondingly lower, at31 percent). Around 16 percent of those traf-ficked into Europe are children.

These figures give only the roughest indicationof the scale of the problem, however. Promptedby a European Commission action plan, a newdrive to collate better data at EU level waslaunched in 2012: the first, vital step, perhaps,in the mobilisation of an EU-wide campaignagainst THB.

Frontex has taken a pro-active role in thatmobilisation. In response to the EC’s 2011 direc-tive, the Frontex Training Unit developed anEU-wide counter-THB training manual, whichwas published in 2012. Drawing on the expertiseof 12 member states, as well as international or-ganisations such as the European Police College,IOM and UNHCR, the manual represents thefirst ever attempt to standardise internationallythe techniques and skills required to detect thismost elusive of crimes. The training programme,designed to complement schemes that alreadyexist in member states, is based on whatYordanka Minkova, the project coordinator, calls

“the three Ps” of THB: prevention, protection andprosecution.

“Before now there was virtually no train-ing on international traäcking in many mem-ber states,” she says. “Their capacity was toovariable. This manual is the first step in settinga common standard. But it is only a first step.

Frontex can’t do everything – and it is clear thata lot more integration is still required.”

The manual is complemented by other publica-tions, such as the Handbook on Risk Profiles, thefirst edition of which appeared in 2011. Pocket-sized, solidly bound, and with a handy colour-coded country-by-country thumb index, thehandbook is specifically designed for use byhard-pressed border guards working in the field.

Useful though these publications are, there is nodoubt that there is still much work to be donein the fight to eradicate THB. The crime hasbeen singled out by European policy-makers forspecial attention: there is a concerted push tostamp out modern slavery, involving many EUagencies and international bodies. An EU Anti-Traäcking Coordinator presides over a multi-agency front to tackle the crime through clearstrategic priorities: prevention, protection andprosecution. The word protection comes firstfor a reason – the victim comes first. In the caseof children, however, such clear lines can easilyblur. Victim protection is a must, but for oäcerson duty it can be vexing.

Jan Karl Hoilund, a police detective on a four-year secondment from Denmark, is particularlyfrustrated by the EU’s approach to minors at theborder. “The legislation is inadequate, and thereis a remarkable absence of guidelines and bestpractices in it, leading to a myriad of interpreta-tions among border guards… We are paranoid

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“They tell you that

out there

life is diãerent

and you want to leave,

you apply for a job,

you give your passport

to someone who promises

to find you a good job

and then makes you

a prostitute.

You dream of

being independent,

but they lock you up,

you are alone

with no money.

You believe that

nothing could happen

to you…

and then you just

disappear.

OPEN YOUR EYES!”

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about child abuse in the EU. At the border postsin many countries you can’t even interview achild without the presence of a trained specialistor a representative of social services or NGOs.But that can mean a wait of two or three hours,by which time the traäcker, who may be behindthe child in the queue, is long gone.”

The rules surrounding Eurodac, the EU’s finger-print database of asylum seekers and irregularborder-crossers, forbid taking the prints ofanyone under 14, which Hoilund thinks mayneed revision. “In some countries these chil-dren are bussed to a camp for processing – andthen they often just disappear. Why don’t weregister these children for their own protection?Children travelling alone are generally given anairline crew escort, but there are, due to lack ofstaã and procedures, often no authority checksat all on who they are handed over to at theother end. Finding the right balance betweenguaranteeing freedom of movement and provid-ing security to vulnerable children is diäcult.”

The interview of a child, Hoilund acknowledges,is a controversial and “damn diäcult” business.A workshop on child-traäcking, organised byFrontex in Dublin, underlined that there are,

“5,000 ways of dealing with kids… knowing whatquestions to ask them is a personal thing thatcomes from gut instinct and experience; it’s adiäcult thing to teach.”

There have beenlots of studies,but none has beenwritten fromthe lawenforcementperspective.

Frontex aims, nevertheless, to produce a set ofEU guidelines, in handbook form, on how todeal with children at the border.

“There have been lots of studies, but none hasbeen written from the law enforcement per-spective,” says Hoilund. There is a severe lack of

‘best practice’ to lean on. At the moment borderguards are facing severe challenges in imple-menting the current system.”

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A poster from Bulgaria, part of atraícking awareness campaignlaunched by the IOM. Traíckingvictims are commonly promisedjobs in the EU but, on arrival,find themselves robbed of theirpassport and end up as prosti-tutes or slaves

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Dog handling

With so much emphasis on new technology atthe frontiers, dog-handler training seems anunlikely specialism for Frontex to have devel-oped since 2007. As every border guard knows,however, there are instances where a well-trained dog can out-perform technologydue to its mobility and lack of dependency oncircumstances and environment.

During Joint Operation Minerva, which targetedmigrants smuggled into Spain by ferry fromMorocco, sniãer dogs detected 120 people whohad been missed by standard detection technol-ogy. Some machines, such as heartbeat detec-tors, require silence to work at full capacity: arequirement that limits their eäcacy in a busyferry terminal.

Development of Standards and Training for EUBorder Guard Canine Teams is a Frontex projectled by Radu Anton, a Romanian border guardwho joined Frontex as a national expert in 2007.For four years before that, one of his tasks wasto coordinate the dog training service at theRomanian Border Police HQ, which had at thatstage 300 trained dogs at its disposal – consid-erably more than the EU average per memberstate. However, the original idea for an EU-leveldog training centre was not Romanian butLatvian. It was another by-product of the EU’s

“When disasters occuror critical situations

arise, there is oneteam that will

still be there,at the borders,

searching for ex-plosives, narcotics,

bio-scent: the manand the dog”

Radu Anton, Dog HandlerTraining Project

eastward expansion in 2004. To begin with,in 2007, there were just six member statesinvolved, most of them East European. Todaythere are 39 states signed up, whose dog han-dlers are trained in any of 49 training centresacross Europe.

Anton’s mission is to establish a deployable poolof dogs and dog trainers, trained to a commonstandard, with a particular emphasis on uphold-ing both human and animal rights, in line withEU norms. “It is not acceptable to use a dog tochase a fugitive unless the individual representsa danger,” explains Anton. “It would be techni-cally possible, and cheaper, to train a dog inmultiple tasks: use of force, search and rescue,detection of narcotics, etc. But combining useof force with search and rescue, for example, in-creases the chances of innocent people gettinghurt during operations. We advocate careful as-sessment of the impact that combined speciali-sations may have.”

Using the right breed for the job is anotherimportant principle: small spaniels are more ap-propriate for car searches, big German or Dutchshepherd dogs are better for patrolling a landborder where they may risk being stabbed orshot at by smugglers. The environment also hasto be taken into account: a dog from Finland,used to the cold, is unlikely to perform at fullcapacity immediately after arriving in Greece orSpain, and vice versa.

Dogs remain an irreplaceableasset in the detection of drugs,weapons and explosives

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There are, he says, marked cultural diãerenceswithin the EU in the way that dogs are trainedand deployed; using them in the wrong way canprofoundly damage the international image ofthe EU as a place that upholds fundamental hu-man rights. “How do we view our borders, andwhat are we to do there? We apply and upholdthe law. This is something that has to be cali-brated so we can build canine teams to supportthis mission, and this mission only.”

Anton launched an eight-week training coursefor EU border guard canine team instructors.

“We’ve had 19 candidates for the instructorcourse,” he says, “and not all of them passed thefirst assessment. The standards and our ex-pectations are high as much has beeninvested in order to build and certify the elite ofcanine instructors in Europe.”

As Anton learned from the leading experts of theproject, the key to dog training is to change themindset of the dog through positive reinforce-ment. “You have to make them willing to dosomething, by rewarding them, rather than forc-ing them to do it through punishment. The dogwill try to please you so the training becomes fun.”

Under Frontex rules, the use of spiked collars orelectric prods is strictly banned. Patrol dogs alsohave to be trained to “let go” once the appre-hension of a fugitive has been achieved: “Oth-erwise it could be construed as torture, underEuropean law.”

Anton’s main challenge now is to support mem-ber states so that Erasmus-like programmescan be initiated in this field of expertise. Dogs,he insists, have huge unexploited potential.

“Frontex could one day deploy at the borderscanine teams for other specialisations such asdetecting explosives or weapons. This is beyondFrontex’s remit for now, but there could be atime when cross-border criminality will changeenough for Frontex’s spectrum of assistance tobe widened.”

He acknowledges, also, that there are gaps inthe EU border-guard dog pack: “I agree, thereis an increased need for canine teams at theborders, but quantity cannot solve the problem.We need quality and that is the key element ofFrontex’s canine team training project.”

Dog handler-trainingin Luban, Poland

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Below: A dog-handler is putthrough his paces at the trainingfacility. Frontex’s Common CoreCurriculum for dog-handlers isbecoming the global referencestandard for handler certification

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Research and Development

The research and development of new technol-ogy is critical to EU border security, and lookscertain to play an increasing role as passengertraäc increases in coming decades, aboveall through Europe’s airports. Globally, overthe next 20 years, air passenger numbers arepredicted to rise by 4 percent a year. By 2031, anexpected 12 billion people will take to the skies,more than double the present number – and 2.8billion of these future passengers will take oã orland at a European airport.

Processing such large numbers of people alreadypresents some significant challenges. A borderservice must strike a balance between ensuringcollective security and ensuring the convenienceof the passengers passing through; and somelarge airports – such as Heathrow, Europe’slargest, with 70 million arrivals and departuresevery year – are already struggling. But, asEdgar Beugels, the Dutch head of Frontex’sResearch & Development Unit points out, thereare political and financial limits to the numberof extra border guards that any member statecan employ. New technology, he believes, oãersthe EU the best chance to make up any futureshortfall. “At present we are trying to push ahaystack through a sieve to find a needle,” heexplains. “And how good is an overworked bor-der guard really going to be after an hour or twoin a booth? Or on a Monday morning after a big

“At present we aretrying to push

a haystack througha sieve to find a nee-dle. Technology canmake the haystack

smaller.”

Edgar Beugels, head of R&D,on the advantages

of Automated Border Controlmachines at airports.

weekend? People are human.” Technology, heargues, oãers ways of removing the passengersof no interest from the queue – in other words,it can make the “haystack” smaller – whichin turn improves the performance and detectionrates of the border guards. Machinery, he says,is also much cheaper in the long run.

The most obvious application of this theory isalready visible in many of Europe’s airports: theAutomated Border Control gates, or e-gates,where passports are checked by scanners andidentities verified by machines rather than peo-ple. The first e-gates appeared at Portugal’s Faroairport in 2008, and are becoming increasinglycommon across the continent. The eäciency ofthese machines depends in large part upon thestandardisation of the EU passport, a processthat is still not complete. Machine-readablebiometric data has been included in some EUpassports since 2005, but is not foreseen to beincluded in all of them until 2015.

Biometric data is also becoming more sophisti-cated – for example, it can include details of thepassport holder’s eye, for cross-checking by aniris recognition machine – but again, not all EUpassports are the same. The second generationEU passport, for instance, contains fingerprints

– unlike the first generation passport – but stillno iris data. In parallel with advancing passporttechnology, in 2012, the European Commissionlaunched the Visa Information System (VIS), aSchengen instrument designed to streamline the

These automated bordercrossing (ABC) gates at Lisbonairport were the first in Europe

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roll-out, by 2015, of a pan-European system forthe exchange of visa data – which will eventuallyinclude fingerprints – between member states.

Frontex’s role is to help the member statesshare experience on the rollout of the system,while establishing a set of common proceduresin this newly automated environment. “Cash-point machines were scary at first, but thepublic went through a learning process – thatis, they copied the person in front of them in thequeue – and cashpoints are fully accepted today.We can help speed up this process by ensuringthat a passport is always entered into an ABCmachine in the same way, at whatever airportyou may be at.”

There will be changes for the way border guardsoperate, too. The ABC machines, as Beugels says,are automated rather than automatic. “No bor-der will ever be 100-percent secure. Technologycan only help: it will likely never replace peopleentirely.” ABC machines, in other words, requirehuman oversight. In future, border guards willprobably operate more like customs oäcers –hawk-eyed spotters of anomalies ratherthan frontline passport-checkers. “There arequestions in this regard that have still to beresolved. How many ABC gates can one borderguard oversee? What happens to passengers forwhom ABCs are not suitable – those in wheel-chairs, or the visually impaired? Best practice, astandard set of operating procedures, needs tobe established for every eventuality.”

Frontex’s role is tohelp the memberstates shareexperienceon the rollout ofthe system, whileestablishing aset of commonprocedures in thisnewly automatedenvironment.

Technology has an important role to play onexternal land and sea borders, too. The southernSpanish coast, for instance, is already guardedby a high-tech early warning system knownas SIVE (Sistema Integrado de Vigilancia Exterior).There are 44 SIVE stations, each equipped withan optronic eye, TVV and ARPA (Automatic Ra-dar Plotting Aid), and all of them are connectedto Madrid. Under the umbrella of the EU Eurosurprogramme, SIVE is now being trialled in Sar-dinia and Sicily. Very similar technology is alsoalready in use along Finland’s external borders.

Julian Quiles, the Project Manager for OperationPoseidon Sea, is convinced that SIVE representsthe future of EU border control, and could beextended to all vulnerable external borders asearly as 2017. “It would cost a lot: maybe another€1 billion for the whole of Europe, includingtraining, operation and maintenance. But itsaves lives at sea and is highly eäcient, and itwill be cheaper in the end.”

Edgar Beugels has an even more futuristicvision: he can imagine a time when the ex-ternal borders are routinely patrolled by RPAs

– Remotely Piloted Aircraft. “RPAs can stayairborne for 24 hours at a time. They have greatpotential, particularly in the Mediterraneanarena. The main issue is the operating cost. Fornow, it is too much for most civilian authoritiesto bear. But costs will come down in time.”

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New technology will continueto revolutionise the way theEU’s borders are guarded

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Frontex attaches great importanceto ensuring highest standardson joint return flights

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Returns

It is a common EU policy to return migrantsfound to have overstayed their visas, to havefailed the asylum application process, and forseveral other reasons besides – but the practiceremains highly controversial, particularly whenmigrants are returned by force. EU-wide in 2013,some 160,000 people were returned to theircountries of origin. Frontex itself does not andcannot make decisions to return people: that isentirely the business of the member states itserves. The founding regulation requires theagency to provide member states with support,including, upon request, “coordination ororganisation of joint return operations.” Eventhen, the Frontex Joint Returns Operation Unitis directly involved in just two percent of thetotal number of migrant returns from Europeeach year. On average, Frontex organisesbetween three and four joint returns operationsa month.

“When it comes to returns, Frontex acts as amiddleman,” says John Bleeker, a Dutch borderguard with 20 years’ experience of escort-ing deportees home – a job that he says hastaken him to 89 countries. Bleeker explains theroutine. Frontex might be contacted by immi-gration authorities in one member state whohave organised a charter flight to take Nigerianreturnees to Lagos. Frontex then oãers to co-

“I teach the youngertrainees to try

to put themselves inthe returnee’s shoes.

It’s vital to treatthem humanely.”

John Bleeker,Frontex Returns specialist

finance the operation and informs a number ofother European countries with Nigerian nation-als awaiting return. Half the seats on the planeare then reserved for Nigerians being returnedfrom the organising member state, with theremaining seats parcelled out to returnees fromsix or seven other European states. “It is a usefuland cost-eãective service because many smallcountries don’t have the capacity to organiseor finance return flights,” says Bleeker. In 2013,Frontex co-financed 39 joint return flights fromthe EU to third countries.

The support Frontex oãers does not stop there.In 2011, as a leader of Project Attica, Bleekerhelped train 150 Greek escorts at the nationalpolice academy, and assisted in the setting up ofa Returns Coordination Oäce in Athens, a jobthat included building from scratch a workingrelationship with the third-country embassiesinvolved.

Because the vast majority of return operationsare conducted by member states at the nationallevel, Frontex lays great importance on special-ist training for escorts. The training puts strongemphasis on respect for human rights, whichis of particular importance in the politicallysensitive area of returns – as the governing EUdirective makes abundantly clear. For instance,Frontex pointedly refuses to cooperate withsome countries on returns, if they use fullbody restraints for instance, or othermethods ruled out by Frontex guidelines.

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160 0002 150

NUMBER OF PEOPLERETURNED BY EU MEMBER STATES

NUMBER OF PEOPLE RETURNEDIN FRONTEX-COORDINATED OPERATIONS

Source: Frontex Annual Risk Analysis 2014, www.frontex.europa.eu

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Frontex has found that if a returns oäcer isproperly trained, and adheres to best practicesof the highest standards, the use of restraintbecomes unnecessary. “I teach the youngertrainees to try to put themselves in the return-ee’s shoes,” Bleeker says. “It’s vital to treat themhumanely. I let them make a phone call beforeboarding an aircraft. I make a point of shakinghands with them when we part at the other end,even if they have given me trouble – even if theyhave spat at me.”

The identification of best practice in the sphereof returns is, in fact, an obligation under thefounding regulation. In 2009, Frontex produceda 24-page guide, Best Practices for the Removalof Illegally Present Third-Country Nationals by Air,which is notable not just for the amount ofdetail it goes into, but for the care and attentionit pays to protecting the rights of returnees. Thedocument contains advice on everything fromseating plans aboard chartered return flights todress codes, pocket money, luggage allowances,cutlery and even what catering respects thedietary requirements of various religious groups.

“The returns process is always a diäcult one, butgetting the little things right can make things alot easier,” says Bleeker. The importance Frontexattaches to human rights comes through clearlyin the guide’s insistence that a doctor shouldalways be present aboard return flights. A dedi-cated human rights monitor, adds Bleeker, isalso usually on board.

As in other areas of Frontex activity, the iden-tification of best practices in returns remainsa work in progress, so the guide is constantlyupdated. In late 2013, the returns sector alsopublished a new, formal code of conduct forescort oäcers.

The code sets high standards for returns atevery stage. Drafted in close consultation withthe Frontex Consultative Forum on Fundamen-tal Rights as well as with the agency’s Funda-mental Rights Oäcer and member state experts,it gathers the rules and best practices for returnflights to ensure they are conducted in as hu-mane a manner as possible. It also emphasisesthe obligation of all participants to report anyviolations, and the importance of human-rightsmonitors on board.

This way of doing things is getting results. Ac-cording to John Bleeker, there has been a notice-able change in the general behaviour of re-turnees over the last five years: “Eighty percentof return operations these days are peaceful,and there is much less resistance. I think it isbecause we are consistent in the way we treatreturnees, so they know better what to expect.They all know that the returns programme isprofessionally organised now. It’s not about thenumbers of people we return: it’s all about thetraining, the establishment of common stand-ards and best practice.”

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Safeguarding human rights

Frontex understood from the outset the criticalimportance of upholding fundamental rights.This underlying principle was not always ap-parent to the public, however – and some evenaccused Frontex of being deliberately opaque inthe way it operated, or even of being driven by asecret anti-immigrant agenda. NGOs, civil socie-ty organisations and pressure groups seemed tobe queuing up to accuse Frontex of neglectingmigrant rights. The perennial dichotomy of free-dom and security, and the fine balance betweenthe two, will always create detractors on bothsides. To address these concerns, under the 2011Amendment, a “consultative forum” (CF) wasestablished, a body comprising 15 members froma variety of international bodies, EU agencies,governmental and non-governmental organisa-tions, civil society and migrant-rights groups. Itsrole is to advise the Frontex Management Boardon how to continuously improve its strategyon fundamental rights: another instance of thepursuit of best practice. The forum, headed by aChair and Co-chair elected for a one-year term,met for the first time in October 2012, with amandate to meet at least twice a year, and topublish a yearly report on its activities.

The Management Board also appointed In-maculada Arnaez, a human rights lawyer fromBilbao with 15 years’ experience in Bosnia andSouth America, as the agency’s first Funda-

“To me this job is abouttrying to answer the

question: what kind ofa Europe do we

Europeans reallywant? It is about

upholding essentialhumanitarian valuesand the rule of law –two of the foundingprinciples of the EU

after the SecondWorld War.”

Inmaculada Arnaez,Fundamental Rights Oäcer

“My job is tomainstreamfundamentalrights and placethem as the basisof border activities,not just to addthem likeparmesan cheeseon top.”

mental Rights Oäcer. “I liked the job from thevacancy notice because it gave the possibility tosee operations in the field all the way up to theBrussels political arena,” she says. “My job is tomainstream fundamental rights and place themas the basis of border activities, not just to addthem like parmesan cheese on top.”

The CF’s role is advisory; at a typical meeting,in May 2013, participants discussed issues thatincluded fundamental rights training for borderguards, and the setting up of a new code ofconduct for forced return. “It is good for Frontexto embrace the principle of transparency, and toshow a willingness to listen to the views of out-siders,” says Arnaez. The adoption of eãectivehuman rights safeguards is also, perhaps, theclearest possible illustration of Frontex’s grow-ing maturity as an institution.

In Arnaez’s view, the agency’s initial diäcultiesin this arena stemmed from the ambiguouslanguage with which the Schengen BordersCode of 2006 was drafted in the first place. “Thepreamble says that border control “should helpto combat illegal immigration.” But there is nosuch thing as ‘illegal’ immigration. It is not illegalto seek asylum, for instance. And why the defen-sive language, if asylum seekers are as welcomeas we say they are; why must immigration be

‘combated’?”

Migrants are given promptmedical attention on arrivalon Lampedusa

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Arnaez describes her new role as “mostly inter-nal – at least for now.” She acts as an independ-ent compliance oäcer for all Frontex operations,and reports back not only to the ManagementBoard and consultative forum but also directlyto bodies such as LIBE, the Committee on CivilLiberties, Justice and Human Aãairs, as well asto the DROI, Human Rights committee of theEuropean Parliament in Brussels. “I have anadvisory and also a monitoring role,” she says.

“I provide observations, and have added someprecautionary measures to operational plans,particularly guidelines to guest oäcers involvedin operations. So far, they have all been wellreceived.” Guest oäcers on deployment, andindeed all staã, are bound by the Frontex Codeof Conduct, which emphasises the importanceof respecting migrants’ fundamental rights, and

lays out a set of obligatory behavioural stand-ards. It also obliges all oäcers taking part injoint operations to report any instance of viola-tions of fundamental rights they may witness.

“So far I have seen no untoward incidents in thefield that were caused by Frontex operationalactivity,” Arnaez adds.

In future, she suggests, her role might includemore of a public liaison element – although notbefore the human rights component of Fron-tex operations has been given a chance to bedin. “To me this job is about trying to answer thequestion: what kind of a Europe do we Euro-peans really want? It is about upholding theessential humanitarian values and the rule oflaw – two of the founding principles of the EUafter the Second World War.”

It is aboutupholding theessential values ofhuman rightsand the rule of law

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Below: Emergency drill for re-turnee escorts, Schiphol airport,the Netherlands

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On any day in Europe:

At the Sea Border

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The Greek island of Lesvos isjust 8 km from Turkey, makingit one of the greatest immigra-tion pressure points on theEU’s external frontier

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Mytilini, Lesvos, June 2013

As the Aegean sun sets over the mountainsof Lesvos, Captain Nikolas of the Greek CoastGuard noses his patrol boat out of Mytilini har-bour at the start of another 12-hour shift. Theboat, which is powered by two 3,000-horse-power engines and is capable of 44 knots, isquite unlike the small, pretty pastel fishing craftthat jostle at their moorings along the quayside.The tourists dining on calamari in the watersidetavernas look on curiously as we pass.

This feels like the start of another pleasure trip,but it could not be more diãerent. Some ofthe people recovered during a previous patrolare still to be found on the dockside beneaththe Hotel Blue Sea that overlooks the harbourmouth: 30 migrants from, mostly, Afghanistan,Syria and Somalia. They will be screened by theauthorities, with assistance from experts fromother member states, before being transferredto the Greek police for debriefing, again withsupport from a debriefing team of memberstate experts.

At some points on its 320-km coastline, theisland of Lesvos is just 8 km from the Turkishcoast, making it an attractive proposition forthe international people-smuggling industry. Inthe first half of 2013, indeed, the Greek islandsof the eastern Aegean – Lesvos, Samos and

Chios – were among the greatest immigrationpressure points anywhere on the EU’s 51,000-km external frontier.

Captain Nikolas and his three-man crew are, un-surprisingly, exhausted. After 10 days of unusualquiet – the result of a Turkish naval exercise inthe area, which deterred any smuggling opera-tions – a fresh wave of backlogged migrantsis still building. Some 70 were detected in theeastern Aegean just last night – and they are,they say, very likely to find more on this patrol.In the first five months of 2013, the Greek CoastGuard recorded 119 incidents in the easternAegean, in the course of which 2,271 migrantswere detected, and 27 suspeced people-smug-glers were arrested.

The captain peers at the screen of the coastalpatrol vessel’s infrared scanning equipment,and talks about the nightly cat-and-mousegame he and his crew are forced to play.He says the smugglers are clever and highlyorganised, forever varying the times andlocations of their crossing points, probing thecoast guard’s weak points, keeping them guess-ing. Apprehending these people is the coastguard’s highest priority. A week ago, amigrant boat was intercepted near Plomari onLesvos’s south coast, fully 50 km from Turkey,oã a part of the island where such boats havenever been found before. It means that the localoperational area has just been doubled, to 140

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37 036DURING SEARCH AND RESCUE OPERATIONS

in Spain, Italy and Greece in 2013

LIVES SAVED AT SEAIN ONE YEAR

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km of coastline. And yet they still have only fourCoastal Patrol Boats (CPBs) at their disposal.

Under international maritime law, a conven-tion known as SOLAS (Safety of Life at Sea), allvessels are obliged to take anyone they rescueto a place of safety. The territorial line betweenGreece and Turkey, exactly half way across thenarrow strait, is of critical importance, therefore.If a migrant is detected at a location over thisline, they have eãectively completed their at-tempt to enter the EU.

The smugglers sometimes ferry the migrantsby speedboat all the way to the Lesvos coast,before hurriedly disembarking them and rush-ing back to Turkey. More often though, theylaunch a rubber dinghy, put one of the migrantsin charge of the outboard, and point it in thedirection of Lesvos. In these cases, the migrantsare often given a knife and instructed to punc-ture their own boat as soon as they know theyhave been spotted by the coast guard: a way ofensuring that when they are rescued, they arelogged as the beneficiaries of a search-and-res-cue operation, seen as a further guarantee thatthey will be taken to a port in Greece.

Captain Nikolas has nothing but scorn forthese knife-wielding “sinkers.” To a seaman,deliberately scuppering a craft that is typicallycrammed full of women and children is, “theworst crime; they are even worse than thesmugglers.” Changes to Greek law mean that

the sinkers, as well as the people-smugglers, cannow be prosecuted; the practice fell into declineas a consequence, although it still happens.

In 13 years of patrolling these waters, remark-ably, the captain says he has, “lost only one per-son in the course of a rescue – a girl who didn’tget out of the cabin in time before her boatsank.” The migrant voyage from Turkey, thoughshort, is fraught with danger. In December 2012,Lesvos fishermen found 22 bodies at sea, afteran overcrowded dinghy sank at night when theweather turned.

Experience has taught Captain Nikolas how totell the diãerence between the types of migrant:the family groups or the economic migrants,typically young men between 18 and 20, fromwhat he calls, “the real bad guys, the criminals.”

Despite his professionalism and the obviouspride he takes in his work, not all is well withthe captain, or with his colleagues. The workpressure on the local coast guard is unrelenting,while spending cutbacks forced by the Europeanbanking crisis have had far-reaching impactseverywhere. The Greek economy was perhapshit hardest of all by the economic crisis.

“All our boats and our crews are overworked,”says the captain. “Salaries are down 35 percent.We are undermanned, and spare parts for theboats are in short supply.”

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The coast guard acknowledge that the exter-nal support of Frontex in these dire economiccircumstances has been critical. The captain’spatrol boat, for instance, is one of several suchGreek Coast Guard vessels that are co-financedby Frontex under the auspices of OperationPoseidon Sea – a joint operation coordinated byFrontex with the participation of 18 EU memberstates.

Of more immediate value to Captain Nikolas arethe Frontex guest oäcers who operate in a sup-porting role. Coast guard vessels from Romania,Latvia and Malta have also been patrolling thewaters around Lesvos this year. He is also able tocall on the services of a thermo-vision van, sup-plied and manned, this month, by the Slovenianborder service, which scans the strait each nightfrom the cliã tops and reports any unusual activ-ity to the patrols via the coast guard’s headquar-ters in Piraeus. Frontex has also provided experi-enced screeners and debriefers from Belgium andDenmark, as well as Arabic and Afghan interpret-ers from the UK, in support of both the coastguard and the police back on the island.

The level of international coordination involvedin Operation Poseidon Sea is unprecedented. Itscomplexity illustrates the diversity of Frontex’srole. But this is of little consequence right nowto Captain Nikolas and his crew. Darkness hasfallen, and the only light on the bridge comesfrom the patrol boat’s panels and radar screens.Another gruelling night has begun.

Migrants are often instructedto puncture their own boatsin order to force a rescue:a desperate tactic thatendangers lives

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More people are arriving in theEU by air than ever before: amajor challenge for Frontex, nowand in the future

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The Future of Frontex:

2014 and Beyond3From its inception in 2005 and throughout itsgrowth years and early trials to its maturity asa centre of border-control excellence, one thingat least has remained constant: at the helm hasstood Executive Director Ilkka Laitinen. And inhis oäce at Frontex’s Warsaw headquartershe has a clear view of the bigger picture as heprepares to bid farewell to Frontex.

In early 2014, Europe is emerging from a majorglobal recession, European Parliamentary elec-tions loom and the Stockholm Programme – thefive-year justice and home aãairs plan that haddrawn the agency’s guidelines – is coming to anend, its successor yet unveiled. Like Stockholm,Article 76 of the Lisbon Treaty, which under-pinned member states’ obligations towards theirborders, was also due for evaluation. The timesmay be changing, but not the fundamentals inLaitinen’s view.

The agency has entered a period of consolida-tion after a period between 2005 and 2008when as an institution he believes it was grow-ing too fast and had exceeded its digestivecapacity for the role it had taken on.

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European Air Tra÷c in 20351

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A working system of European border guardingis now in place, but the system still needs rein-forcing. He wants more joint operations, moreagreement on the criteria under which theyoperate, better processes, a more professionalapproach to all the challenges the EU faces atits border crossing points. In short, he wants tostrengthen what Frontex has built.

His greatest worry, which he calls “a strategicrisk,” is that European capitals may start regard-ing Frontex as a financial instrument – that is, asa means of accessing funds for border opera-tions – rather than as the custodian of bestpractices and hub of expertise it has grown into.Frontex has proved itself a useful catalyst forimprovement through information exchange, hesays. But it is still only at step one of the neces-sary capacity building.

Nevertheless, he thinks, the level of memberstates’ participation in all Frontex projects is theagency’s most important performance indica-tor – and this, he believes, is succeeding largelybecause participation is based on volition. Evenwithout the legal obligation to participate, hesays, there is much less variation in memberstate support for Frontex than there was only afew years ago. The advent of Eurosur is a perfectexample of this, says Laitinen.

One of Frontex’s greatest achievements since2005, he argues, has been the setting up ofinformation-exchange systems between mem-

ber state border services, leading to a culturein the profession that is totally diãerent frombefore. Awareness has improved. And sohas trust. The whole of Europe isnow joined together through a myriadof networks – personal, institutional and tech-nological. It is the trust and willingness engen-dered by working together that make things likeEurosur possible, he believes, and finds it hardto imagine all those authorities pulling togetherlike that ten years ago.

But it is perhaps not Eurosur that has assuredFrontex’s institutional future so much as theever-growing number of people on the movearound the world. Traäc across the EU’s exter-nal borders, which already stands at 700 millionpassenger movements annually, is predicted togrow by about four percent a year in the decadeuntil 2023. By current trends, 98 percent of themare short-term visitors and only two percentare migrating – and of those, only 100-150,000are doing so irregularly. How those percentagesmight change in future is unknown and worldevents are increasingly sudden and unpredict-able.

It seems paradoxical, therefore, that the EU’s140,000-strong border guard community is cur-rently shrinking, not growing. The trend is to havefewer and fewer border guards watching moreand more people, Laitinen observes. New tech-nologies can help, but it is better processes, nottechnology, that will resolve the gap in the end.

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It is sometimes suggested that the establish-ment of Frontex in 2005 was the first step to-wards the creation of a fully-fledged EuropeanBorder Guard Service that could one day replacethe existing member states’ services, althoughLaitinen treats this prediction with caution.The Lisbon Treaty is very clear that responsibil-ity for the EU’s external borders rests with themember states that abut them, he points out.This is a constitutional question that would de-pend on the speed of integration and directionof Europe. But he has his doubts that an inter-national European border service could ever doa better job than local ones.

Though guarded about a federalised borderservice, he pulls no punches when he describesthe shortfalls in the EU’s policy on migration.Europe was caught out by the Arab Spring in2011, he believes, and there is a strategic, opera-tional risk that the EU failed to learn from: thatthe Middle East and North Africa remain volatile.But these are events. There is much to be donesystemically too.

By way of example, he explains how the lack ofcontrol in the past created a situation wherenobody now knows how many irregular ‘over-stayers’ are resident in the EU – an uncertaintythat has alarmed the public and hampered theresponse of policy-makers. In time, he believes,the EU’s ‘smart borders’ initiative will help toestablish the true number, which will in turnenable law makers to start formulating a clearer

EUimmigration policy.

The central problem, he believes, is that Europe’sleaders have still not resolved the over-archingdichotomy of freedom and security. At policylevel, however, more clarity is needed fromBrussels. Frontex is an operational agency,Laitinen says, but there is no comprehensiveEU policy on immigration to implement. Thatlack of clear policy, he laments, has sometimesturned Frontex into a whipping-boy for the crit-ics. Frontex is seen as an implementing agency,but it does not make policy. Yet as an opera-tional agency it is also obliged to defend thatlack of policy, and the malfunctioning processesthat result.

That said, Laitinen has firm views on the kindof Europe he personally would like to live in.As a Finn born and raised close to the old Sovietfrontier, he explains, he comes from a regioninstinctively opposed to oppressive borderregimes; and he forcefully rejects the notionthat the EU should become, or is becoming,a Fortress Europe.

The numbers speak for themselves, he says.Compared with the volume of legitimate travel,the number of irregular arrivals is tiny. Schengenwas a pioneering project for freedom of move-ment, he believes, and that freedom is worthsecuring.

Air passenger numbers throughHeathrow, the EU’s busiestairport, rose 3% in 2013to 72.3 millions

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The ongoing arrival of irregular migrants meansan eãective border regime is essential, he insists,but this does not need to undermine Europeanvalues and the law.

The purpose of surveillance, according to theSchengen Accord, is the prevention of illegalborder crossing, he says firmly. It’s about fairprocess. It’s no good for anyone if there’s nocontrol at the border.

Most of the increase in traäc is predicted tocome through Europe’s airports. By whatevermeans the migrants come, however, and what-ever flows there may be in the future, Fron-tex’s core objective will remain the same. Suchmassive traäc will require carefully calibratedbacking processes, Laitinen insists. But the keyword is control.

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Twelve Seconds to DecideCopyright 2014 by FrontexAll rights reserved. Reproduction is authorised provided the source is acknowledged.

ISBN 978-92-95033-92-4

doi:10.2819/40814TT-04-14-684-EN-C

Produced by the Frontex Information and Transparency TeamAuthor: James FergussonDesign by IMPRESJA Ewa Jakubowska-GordonPrinted in France

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