Refugees arrive in the village of Skala Sikaminias on the Greek island of Lesvos in a rubber dinghy escorted by a Frontex ship.Image: AP / Michael Varaklas
politics
“Frontex must die so that Refugees can live” – with this statement the left-wing politician Clara Bünger wants to clarify her criticism of the European border protection agency. Because apparently there is a new scandal about the European border protection agency.
Frontex has been heavily criticized by human rights activists for years. Because apparently the employees of the agency are both active and passive in the illegal rejection of People involved at the European external borders. Last year, the EU Parliament also reacted.
Clara Bünger sits for the left in the German Bundestag.Left / Martin Neuhof
With a clear majority, the parliamentarians had approved a motion that Frontex refused to grant discharge for the 2020 budget year. 345 MPs voted in favor of a corresponding motion, 284 voted against and eight MPs abstained.
But Clara Bünger continued to investigate – together with the French newspaper “Le Monde”.
“Le Monde” analyzed pictures together with Bünger and was able to determine that Frontex supplies the Libyan Coast Guard with image material – which she really shouldn’t. The Libyan coast guard then apparently uses this material to intercept refugees and illegally bring them back to Libya.
According to the research, this collaboration works like this:
- Frontex, which, unlike the Libyan Coast Guard, is equipped with drones, mocks refugees in distress in the central Mediterranean.
- Frontex then apparently informed the Libyan coast guard.
- The coast guard drives into European sovereign waters, intercepts the refugees and takes them back to Libya.
This practice is called pull-back. Accordingly, Frontex does not participate in illegal pushbacks – because that would mean that they would intercept the refugees themselves and deport them without the possibility of an asylum procedure. Instead, you help Libya to bring people back.
The fact that significantly more people are currently making their way to Europe is now also becoming clear from the figures.
In Germany more people applied for asylum last year than at any time since 2016.
Number of asylum applications increased sharply
The annual statistics for 2022 published by the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (Bamf) on Wednesday show that from the beginning of January to the end of December, 217,774 people made such a request for protection in Germany for the first time. That was almost 47 percent more than in the previous year. Most new asylum seekers came out last year Syria (70,976), Afghanistan (36,358), Turkey (23,938), Iraq and Georgia.
A makeshift camp for refugees near the border between Serbia and Hungary.Image: AP / Darko Vojinovic
In 2016, the number of requests for protection reached a high of 722,370 initial applications. In the years that followed, the number of asylum seekers fell steadily. According to experts, the fact that it rose again in 2021 was also due to catch-up effects as a result of the strict travel restrictions in the 2020 corona pandemic.
Clara Bünger said with regard to the increased number of asylum applications: “Around the world, people are being threatened by political repression, wars, the consequences of climate change and threats to their existence Poverty driven to flee.” It is therefore not surprising that the number of asylum applications has now increased.
(With material from the dpa)
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