Book Review: Monitoring Border Violence in the EU: Frontex in Focus 

Guest post by Romit Bhandari. Romit is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of East London (UEL). His research focuses on international refugee law.  

Review of: Monitoring Border Violence in the EU: Frontex in Focus edited by Elspeth Guild (Routledge, 2024) 

Elspeth Guild’s edited volume, Monitoring Border Violence in the EU, engages with a classic question: “who will watch the watchmen?” The book is framed around the impunity for the violence occasioned by authorities at international borders, in particular, it examines the brutal policing of asylum seekers at the EU’s borders and the role of its border agency, Frontex. 

The compilation of this book is a reaction to an explosive public scandal, which led to the resignation of Frontex’s director in 2022, a figure who has since reinvented himself as a far-right MEP with France’s National Rally. From 2020 onwards, a series of media exposés – including a New York Times front page – had chronicled Frontex’s involvement in human rights violations at Europe’s external borders. This was met with blanket denials by Frontex, even before the European Parliament, before a whistleblower triggered an investigation by the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF). Its 2022 Report revealed how their inaction, complicity and cover-ups endangered the lives of asylum seekers. 

This book was thus commissioned by the European Parliament’s Greens/EFA as they sought to provide practical safeguards against Frontex’s growing competences. Its goal is to examine how states can temper the use of force and close the accountability gap. Its main argument is that independent monitoring is an indispensable tool in making border policing compliant with fundamental rights. 

Performative versus Practical Realities 

Reflecting its practical orientation, the book follows a logical narrative arc and has four distinct kinds of inquiries: clarifying the nature of the problem, understanding Frontex, the characteristics of independent monitoring and case studies of impunity. Its organisation allows the emergence of one of the book’s leitmotifs: the contrast between performance and practicalities. 

In chapters 1–3, Guild contextualises and provides the foundations for the rest of the book. She discusses the rights of asylum seekers at the border, the forms of border violence in Europe (which include pushbacks at land and sea) and international standards for policing. At times, this is necessarily doctrinal, but there are periodic nods to the camera obscura of migration control – as she reminds us that crossing a border used to be a normal activity, now somehow perceived to be a threat to security and sovereignty. This absurdity is memorably recounted through the example of migrant instrumentalisation in 2021, when 8000 vulnerable asylum seekers, mainly from Afghanistan and Syria, crossed the Belarussian border into Poland and Lithuania. They were described by the EU Commission as “a hybrid attack launched by the Belarusian regime” to destabilise the Union, and their weaponisation was used to justify the use of force against them. 

The second part (chapters 4 – 6) shifts the focus to Frontex. Busuttil traces the evolution of Frontex’s mandate, noting for example, that at its inception in 2004 there was a single preambular reference in its regulations to fundamental rights. With concerns about its ability to uphold these international protections, the Legislator responded with a proliferation of references in its legal framework, bringing the number up to 230. It is a masterclass in the dry juxtaposition of cosmetic amendments and escalating violence. She notes that “it is amply clear that these violations have not been affected by the increased references to fundamental rights in the legislative setup” (p.57). 

In chapters 5 and 6, Guest explores Frontex’s system of internal oversight, now comprising a Fundamental Rights Officer (FRO), Serious Incident Reports (SIR) and a fundamental rights strategy. But this design effectively allows Frontex to “mark its own homework”. Using the OLAF report, she demonstrates how ruthlessly the FRO had been circumvented. Emails and WhatsApp messages from the Director compared the FRO to Pol Pot, noting their desire to bring a Khmer Rouge style regime of terror to the agency. SIRS were purposely miscategorised to prevent the FRO from assessing incidents. As one witness explained, the “[g]eneral rule was to keep the FRO out of the loop as much as possible”. 

As such, internal monitoring on its own is insufficient, and the next section (chapters 7 and 8) is dedicated towards the requisites of independent monitoring. Guild and Kuskonmaz survey material from both legislators and courts, concluding that effective monitoring must be external, independent, and transparent. Chapters 9 and 10 follow with reviews of case studies of impunity. One example stands out for its dehumanisation, which takes place in the aftermath of the Anglo-French Sandhurst Treaty 2018 - through which the UK agreed to pay the French authorities 63m Euros to patrol beaches in order to prevent irregular departures. Despite their surrender, French police fired (potentially lethal) rubber bullets at migrants trying to use a dinghy to cross the channel from Dunkirk. They shot two Iranian Kurds, who suffered a fractured leg and a broken hand. Witnesses reported that the police looked on laughing. Guild notes that the reporting of this disproportionate force is hampered by the fact that these operations take place at remote locations and at unsociable hours – 2am on a beach in Dunkirk. As such, independent monitoring requires real resources.  

This is a particularly important consideration in light of the latest shift in EU’s asylum policy, pursued in its Pact on Migration and Asylum, geared towards the efficient removal of irregular migrants. Monitoring is defined in vague terms yet anticipated to provide an important counterbalance against the speedier processing and return of applicants. As such, those implementing the Pact would do well to read this book, which in its conclusion, makes a practical recommendation on the form of independent monitoring. Choosing between three main options, it suggests a hybrid monitoring framework similar to the European Data Protection Supervisor would be most apt, including at a national level the involvement of human rights institutions and ombudspersons. Protection gaps exist – both within and across states – and overlapping remits should be encouraged rather than avoided. This work will be of particular interest to those studying and researching EU law and policy, refugee law, and migration studies. 

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