Accountability of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency: Recent developments, legal standards and existing mechanisms

This paper looks into the increased capacities, tasks and competences of Frontex (the European Border and Coast Guard Agency), brought about by the 2016 legislative reform. We examine whether this development was accompanied by an accountability regime of equal strength. The existing accountability mechanisms are measured against the standards of European Union (EU) primary and secondary law. The paper assesses the political, administrative, professional and social accountability of Frontex, including parliamentary oversight and the newly introduced individual complaints mechanism. The final part of the paper focuses on legal accountability, a strong, yet highly complex, form of accountability. There, we introduce the concept of systemic accountability and investigate possible courses of legal action against Frontex. In sum, Frontex is subject to moderately increased scrutiny under its renewed founding Regulation and to various EU accountability mechanisms of general application. But several procedural and practical hurdles could render legal accountability difficult to achieve in practice.