European Union member states must boost the EU's border defence agency, Frontex, giving it the men and machines it needs to do its job, dpa the EU's new commissioner for home affairs as saying today. Frontex is meant to help member states police the EU's frontier, but officials say that it is hampered by those states' failure to provide the equipment and staff that they had promised. "One of the problems is that member states sign up to different operations ... and then in the end they don't deliver the equipment or the staff, and that makes it very difficult for Frontex to plan operations," Cecilia Malmstrom told journalists in Brussels. As a result, the European Commission, the EU's executive, wants member states to approve a new set of rules for Frontex which would bind them to deliver on any promises of equipment they make. "The intention is that Frontex would, a year in advance, signalize about its coming operations, and member states then would signalize what equipment or staff they would contribute. Once they've done that, it would be compulsory," Malmstrom said. The rules would not imply any increase in Frontex' current budget of 80 million euros (109 million dollars) a year, she said. Frontex was set up in 2005 to help coordinate between member states on the massive task of policing the bloc's borders, which stretch from the Arctic Circle to the latitude of North Africa. It was headquartered in Warsaw, well-positioned to watch the lengthy and notoriously porous land border with Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. But in recent years, the focus of attention has turned to the Mediterranean, with tens of thousands of illegal migrants crossing the sea annually, and some 2,000 drowning every year. That has led Mediterranean states to urge their EU fellows to take over some of the migrants who reach their shores each year. Malmstrom said that Wednesday's proposal was the first of many she would make to set up an EU-wide system of asylum and migration which would encourage legal migrants and discourage illegal ones. At the same time, she called on member states to step up human-rights training for all border guards taking part in Frontex missions, and for at least one humanitarian observer to be present on any repatriation flight organized by the agency. EU governments and the European Parliament - of which Malmstrom is a former member - now have to debate the proposals.
