Frontex

Frontex – the European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the European Union

Everybody knows this organisation, but nearly nobody knows what’s happening behind the scenes.

Frontex, who is managing the europeen borders, struggles between policing and the human rights.

It is the question how humanitarian ideals work in real life, how they work with border policing,  and how they are related to the international human rights standards.

Nobody can imagine which kind of challenges the officers working at the borders have to face in their every day work. They are struggeling between safety work and humanitarian work.

The officers  have to deal with unprepared situations, challenges that are invisible to the national public, poorly acknowledged by national police and justice.

Some officers were obviously faced with maltreatment of migrants and bad behaviour of some bodyguards opposite to the migrants.

The Frontex workers see in which bad cirumstances some migrants are living at the borders and how exhausted and leached out some oft hem reach the borders. These are more or less invisible facts fort he public.

The difficult aspect is, that humanitarian aspects do not always fit with the traditional policing ethos, that makes some Frontex workers insecure about their work. They realize the difficult and often bad circumstances and aren’t sure if it is right what they do.

Some explain that they want to be persons of trust for the migrants, they should not feel like talking to the police, when they arrive at the borders, they should not be afraid. Some Frontex workers try to offer the migrants a better arrival, they are buying some items of their own money, for example some water, medicines or a piece of chocolate.

There exists the tension between being a police men  as social worker and the dominant concept of a proper police worker as crime fighter.

Luckily some of them consider human treatment of migrants as an important part of their work, but this distinguishes them from other police cultures.

Another difficult point is, that it does not exist clarity about the number of people who die at the borders and at the sea. If there is no data, an issue or problem will not be recognized, experts describe the situation. The technical possibilities are getting better and the recording numbers are higher, but the will to work on it seems weak.

SinaLS