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The voluntary work is over: the EU border protection agency Frontex has existed since 2004, but until now the authority had to rely on the member states of the EU to voluntarily assign their own officials, who then work on behalf of Frontex.

That is changing now;

in future Berlin and other capitals will no longer have a choice.

As of this year, the EU states are obliged to send police officers to the EU's external borders so that they can work for Frontex there.

Up until now, the Warsaw-based agency had registered its needs annually, and the administration in Germany had followed this requirement when dispatching officials.

The change also means that Germany has to be much more committed than before.

So far, Frontex has only had the right to request staff from the member states in exceptional situations.

Should a situation arise again like during the refugee crisis in 2015 or a similar extreme situation, the agency could send a call to the capitals at any time to send their forces, who are part of the so-called rapid deployment pool.

The federal government would then have to send up to 225 officials.

Secrecy in the federal government

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How many emergency services Germany has otherwise contributed on the basis of voluntary commitment, that emerges from a response by the federal government to a small question from FDP member Jürgen Martens.

The statements from the Federal Ministry of the Interior are instructive, as they show the extent to which Germany has so far participated in the operations.

According to this, officials from Germany worked a total of 41,792 days for the EU agency in 2018.

That corresponds to an average of 114 officials over the whole year, the answer said.

The Federal Police, which is also responsible for border protection in this country, provided a total of 29,654 deployment days or the equivalent of 79 officers.

The other forces were delegated from the federal states, the Federal Criminal Police Office and the customs administration.

In the two previous years, the commitment was on a similar scale.

In 2019, German forces performed a total of 38,437 operational days, which corresponds to the equivalent of 105 police officers deployed over the entire year.

In 2020, forces from Germany had performed 33,160 days of deployment up to and including October, which corresponded to 109 deployed forces over the year.

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The federal government does not want to publish what material is involved in the operations.

The Ministry of the Interior has marked this part of the answer as “For official use only”.

"The question concerns information that must be kept secret for reasons of the state well-being," the answer said.

If it is known which material Germany is using, it could affect the operations.

In an earlier request from the FDP parliamentary group in 2018, however, the ministry was far more willing to provide information: At the time, the response said that the federal police were participating in Frontex-coordinated operations with two control and patrol boats and a total of 15 patrol vehicles.

Frontex vehicles on the Albanian-Greek border

Source: AFP

The FDP MP Martens considers the German contributions made so far to be insufficient.

"The answer from the federal government clearly shows that Germany's commitment to Frontex is too low and falls short of the need," says the legal policy spokesman for the FDP parliamentary group.

“Given the urgency of the problems, Germany has to do more.

The commitment must go well beyond the contribution that Germany is obliged to make anyway. "

Germany cut funding for Frontex

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In fact, with the end of the voluntary service, the demands on Germany will increase: By 2027, Frontex is to be expanded from the current 1,500 to 10,000 civil servants, and the number of emergency services from Germany will increase accordingly.

Because these officials are also posted by the individual Member States.

The corresponding EU regulation provides that Germany will provide 61 emergency services for the standing reserve this year.

In addition, there are another 540 employees for short-term assignments.

The requirements will continue to increase every year in the coming years.

In 2027 and in the following years, Germany is to contribute 225 civil servants from the federal level and from the federal states to the permanent reserve and 827 to the permanent reserve for short-term assignments.

In addition, there are 225 reservists for the immediate deployment pool that already existed.

The emergency services support local border officers in their work on site: One of the tasks of the officers who are deployed in the context of Frontex is, for example, to register migrants, as in the Canary Islands, where many people from Africa are currently arriving on boats, or at To monitor the border fences at the EU external borders in Eastern and Southeastern Europe and to check vehicles at border crossings.

Despite the higher contingents, people in Brussels are unhappy with Frontex's involvement in Berlin and other national capitals.

However, this has nothing to do with the staff that Berlin and the federal states send, but with financial questions: The EU Commission, the powerful authority that manages the EU budget and is affiliated with Frontex, asked the member states for more money to pay for the agency.

For the medium-term EU financial planning from 2021 to 2027, i.e. the period in which Frontex is to grow rapidly in terms of personnel and take on additional tasks, the authority requested 10.3 billion euros for the work of the agency.

At the mammoth summit in July, however, Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron and the other heads of government trimmed this amount.

At that time they agreed on the Corona reconstruction fund for Europe, the medium-term budget MFF and that Frontex should receive around 43 percent less money in the years from 2021 to 2027 than requested by the Commission.

The cuts caused criticism even then;

Federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said, for example, that the sharp cuts jeopardized the financing of a common European asylum policy.

In negotiations with the member states represented by the German EU ambassador Michael Clauss, the European Parliament was able to extract an additional half a billion euros.

In total, the member states will spend a total of around 5.6 billion euros on the work of the agency by 2027.