• Internal documents from the European Union Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) indicate that Bulgaria pressured Frontex officers into ignoring migrants’ rights abuses in exchange for experiencing “how border guarding works” in practice.
• Hungary has declared that it will not pay the € 200 million fine imposed on it by the Court of Justice of the European Union in June for its failure to apply EU asylum law.
• The EU has signed a Frontex cooperation agreement with Serbia.

On 3 July, EUobserver revealed the contents of internal documents from the European Union Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) which indicate that Bulgaria pressured Frontex officers into ignoring migrants’ rights abuses in exchange for experiencing “how border guarding works” in practice. The documents suggest that Bulgarian border guards consciously abused the rights of asylum seekers at the country’s border with Türkiye while pressuring Frontex officers to ignore it in return for receiving full access to the border. Previously released redacted documents by Frontex’s fundamental rights officer, Jonas Grimheden, highlight numerous “allegations of collective expulsions and ill-treatment by Bulgarian authorities at the Bulgaria-Türkiye border”. Grimheden told EUobserver that he was not able to comment on cases that were currently under investigation, but he wrote: “More generally about fundamental rights problems we see in some countries, it is of course essential that identified problems are addressed”. Tineke Strik MEP said: “The modus operandi of the Bulgarian border police follows a pattern that we witness all over the EU’s external borders: Frontex officers are being kept out of critical areas or pressured not to report violations, so national authorities can push people back and the EU can pretend not to know”. “The EU and Frontex cannot remain complicit, and have a responsibility to end these practices, by freezing funding and halting Frontex support, in accordance with their legal obligations,” she added.

On 5 July, less than a week into its presidency of the Council of the EU, Hungary declared that it would not pay the € 200 million fine that it received by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in June for failing to apply EU asylum law. “We are not planning on paying this fine because this is completely unfair,” declared Hungarian deputy interior minister Bence Rétvári. “This fine that we received was political pressure because of our approach to illegal migration,” he added. He also vowed that the Hungarian government would “continue to protect the external border of Hungary” and find a solution in “a matter of days”. Zsolt Szekere from ECRE member organisation the Hungarian Helsinki Committee said that ever since the CJEU’s original judgment in December 2020, the Hungarian government had been trying to create “an illusion of legality around its blatant non-compliance”. “This is a very clear example of how a seemingly isolated and not necessarily unpopular legal regime in the field of asylum and migration can have far-reaching implications for the rule of law and EU law as a whole,” he added. Although the CJEU has no formal powers to force Hungary to pay the fine, the European Commission may be able to offset it against other payments due to the country, according to established practice. “That’s the way we do it,” a commission spokesman told EUobserver. “We already did it with Poland and the Turow mine”.

On 25 June, the EU signed a Frontex co-operation agreement with Serbia. Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson and Serbian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior Ivica Dacic signed the deal in Belgrade. Johansson praised the strengthened partnership between Serbian border police and Frontex in fighting crime, migrant smuggling and irregular migration in the Western Balkans: “The Frontex Status Agreement we signed today will upgrade our cooperation”. “Under the command and lead of the Serbian authorities, Frontex will support the Serbian border police and law enforcement at the borders with Bosnia Herzegovina and North Macedonia,” she said. Dacic explained that, under the upgraded agreement, “police forces will be deployed not only on the state borders with Hungary and Bulgaria as part of operation ‘Serbia Mainland’, but also on the state borders of Serbia with third countries” and that this would contribute to the “fight against cross-border crime and irregular migration”.

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