EU’s Frontex Tripped in Its Plan for ‘Intrusive’ Surveillance of Migrants

On November 17 last year, when Hervé Yves Caniard entered the 14-floor conference room of the European Union border agency Frontex in Warsaw, European newspapers were flooded with stories of refugees a few hundreds kilometres away, braving the cold at the Belarusian border with Poland.

A 14-year-old Kurd had died from hypothermia a few days earlier; Polish security forces were firing teargas and water cannon to push people back.

The unfolding crisis was likely a topic of discussion at the Frontex Management Board meeting, but so too was a longer-term policy goal concerning migrants and refugees: the expansion of a mass surveillance programme at Europe's external borders.

PeDRA, or 'Processing of Personal Data for Risk Analysis,' had begun in 2016 as a way for Frontex and the EU police body Europol to exchange data in the wake of the November 2015 Paris attacks by Islamist militants that French authorities had linked to Europe's then snowballing refugee crisis.

At the November 2021 meeting, Caniard and his boss, Frontex's then executive director, Fabrice Leggeri, were proposing to ramp it up dramatically, allowing Frontex border guards to collect what some legal experts have called 'intrusive' personal data from migrants and asylum seekers, including genetic data and sexual orientation; to store, analyse and share that data with Europol and security agencies of member states; and to scrape social media profiles, all on the premise of cracking down on 'illegal' migration and terrorism.

The expanded PeDRA programme would target not just individuals suspected of cross-border crimes such as human trafficking but also the witnesses and victims.

Caniard, the veteran head of the Frontex Legal Unit, had been appointed that August...