Quellenangabe:
Actionday on June 6th, 2008 in Warsaw/Poland: SHUT DOWN FRONTEX! (vom 18.04.2008),
URL: http://no-racism.net/article/2520/,
besucht am 18.11.2024
[18. Apr 2008]
Transnational Resistance against the "European Border Agency" - Fight the Border Regime - for Global Freedom of Movement!
Protest and press-conference in front of the headquarters of FRONTEX in Warsaw, against european borderregime and its externalisation to the East and South, in the frame of the transnational chain of migrationrelated actions!
While the number of migrants and refugees is rising everywhere, the European Union is implementing a more and more restrictive border regime to limit, control and "manage" migration according to its own interests. The result is violent exclusion of migrants and refugees, leading to thousands of people dying every year outside the walls of Fortress Europe, in the desert, in the Mediterranean sea or in the Atlantic ocean, leading to enforced mass deportations, leading to millions of "undocumented migrants" and asylum seekers who are deprived of fundamental Human Rights and Labour Rights. FRONTEX, the "European Border Agency", plays a crucial core role for this racist european border regime and has achieved rapidly growing importance and budget since its foundation in 2005.
The job of FRONTEX is to link, to coordinate and to harmonise the work of national border control forces of the Eurpean Union's member states, integrating responsibilities of police forces, military forces and secret services. Being granted a high level of autonomy, FRONTEX is exercising its growing power without any obligatory criteria of transparency and parliamentary control. Together with national border guard agencies, FRONTEX officers carry out a growing number of anti-migrant-operations. According to the EU-commission, FRONTEX has participated in picking up and rejecting 53.000 people along the European Union's borders in 2006 and 2007. In 2006, FRONTEX carried out operations outside EU-territory to prevent African migrants from reaching Lampedusa, Malta and the Canary Islands by boat. For this task, FRONTEX produces the image of a war against the threat of "illegal migration", and thus legitimizing the use of military equipment like warships, aircraft and helicopters. As a first step in tightening the closure of the EU's southern sea borders, FRONTEX connected the EU member states in the region in a "European Patrols Network", and Frontex also carries out various joint operations in order to build a common european border regime. With the recently added component of the so-called Rapid Border Intervention Teams (RABITs), Frontex is moving fast towards a militarised border guard agency, a cornerstone in the fortification of europe.
To be sure, such border control operations and measures are responsible for more and more migrants dying. Fighting migration does not stop the causes of migration, but forces refugees and migrants to choose increasingly dangerous travelling routes. Nevertheless, FRONTEX and its partner institutions cynically present their chase of migrants as a "humanitarian engagement against criminal human trafficking".
A growing focus of FRONTEX since the enlargement of the Schengen area is the control of the eastern borders. FRONTEX is also involved in research on "illegal migration" and technical measures, technical equipment for border surveillance and training programmes for border police forces. Furthermore, FRONTEX has been given the mandate for negotiations with states outside the EU to collaborate on border surveillance and migration control. Besides this, FRONTEX increasingly engages in networking the national authorities of EU member states to carry out joint charter-flight deportations.
Recently, the EU-commission, presented a proposal for a so-called "Border Package", titled "A comprehensive vision for an integrated European border management system for the 21st century". According to this plan, FRONTEX shall function as a central coordination hub in the architecture of a european border regime unprecedented. An all-encompassing European Border Surveillance System (EUROSUR) will spy on migrants from the very beginning of their journey to Europe, while a biometric entry/exit system at the borders will control all movements into and out ouf the European Union. All this will have Frontex at it centre. .
FRONTEX represents a militarised security-regime in which police, border control, migration authorities, army and secret services are forming a more and more integrated complex of repression, dividing the world along hierarchies between rich and poor, between (western) Europe and "the others", between those who have rights, those who have less rights and those who have no rights at all. We've had enough of this so-called security. We've had enough of people being killed, of people being rejected, being imprisoned or being deported by the border regime. We want no migration control and no border surveillance. We want no hierarchies of capitalist, racist and sexist exploitation and exclusion. We want Global Freedom of Movement and Global Rights for everyone!
Migrationrelated groups and networks from all over Europe are invited to send delegates to Warsaw: