Behind-the-scenes preparations ahead of the summit of European leaders on Thursday and Friday have yielded one final piece of agreement on managing EU borders, cobbled together in the last few hours.
Reliable sources tell Brussels Blog there has been a breakthrough in the negotiations to bolster Frontex, the EU’s budding border guard agency.
The new regulations — which still have to formally approved by parliament later this year — will give Frontex the ability to buy or lease equipment such as helicopters, planes and patrol boats for the first time.
Currently, it has to beg, borrow or steal whatever surplus kit national border guards can spare, an arrangement which has hampered its operational capabilities since it was founded in 2005.
The Warsaw-based agency will also be able to call up national patrol teams for border missions, something it struggles to do currently. Under existing regulations, countries volunteer border guards freely but have the bad habit of pulling them out of Frontex secondment just when they are needed most. That’s no longer meant to happen: commitments from countries will become basically irrevocable.
The deal comes in the midst of an ongoing migration crisis which has prompted EU leaders to push for a watering down of the Schengen free-travel area, one of the big discussion topics at the summit.
Frontex is doing what it can on the most porous bits of the EU border, particularly in Greece and the central Mediterranean. But with a measly budget of just over €100m and intermittent political support from big EU member states, its scope has been limited.
The announcement will undoubtedly be trumpeted as the creation of an EU border force. But it falls quite short of that, consciously: EU member states aren’t quite ready to give up border patrolling to Brussels. Rather, it’s a small but symbolically charged step towards having a European force run what with Schengen has effectively become a European border.
Indeed, it was a purely symbolic aspect of the new regulations which held up a deal in recent weeks. Leaders couldn’t agree what to call deployments of Frontex border patrol guards deployed on missions such as the one currently in Greece. Should it be a “border corps”? Too federalist. A “pool of border guards”? Not federalist enough. And can they be called “EU border guards”, when non-EU countries are involved in Schengen?
The compromise: European Border Guard Teams.
Political agreement was sealed between the European parliament, the Commission and the Hungarian rotating presidency of the EU last night, sources say. An announcement will likely come on Thursday.
The last-minute deal is a small coup for the Hungarian presidency, and an unexpected one after expectations had been managed downwards in recent weeks. The Hungarians have deftly handled matters relating to Schengen, not letting the bluster of the migration crisis lead to an irreparable EU crisis. The upcoming agreement on Croatian accession will also be vaunted as a success, if indeed it is not delayed by last-minute hiccups. That should partly make up for the failure to bring Romania and Bulgaria into Schengen – an early aim of Hungary’s six-month term that was dropped after strong opposition led by France and Germany.
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