V. Frontex’s Responsibility for Exposing Migrants to Inhuman and Degrading Treatment With the Lisbon Treaty, which entered into force on December 1, 2009, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union became binding law on all European Union agencies.131 Frontex’s authority to act, therefore, is not unlimited, but rather is fettered by the Charter. Article 18 guarantees "the right to asylum" and Article 4 of the Charter states, "[N]o one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment."132 Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) also guarantees the right not to be treated in a degrading or inhuman way, using the exact same language. Under these standards, Frontex’s activities may be subject to review by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) for their adherence to fundamental rights norms, as acknowledged by Frontex in its Fundamental Rights Strategy.133 Human Rights Watch believes that Frontex has fallen short of its obligations to respect the absolute prohibition on exposing individuals to inhuman and degrading treatment as a result of its cooperation with Greek authorities in detaining migrants in Greek detention facilities where the conditions violate European and international human rights standards. In this chapter we analyze Frontex’s violation of the prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment against the most relevant analogy to Frontex’s activity already discussed by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in, M.S.S. v. Belgium and Greece. In this case, the court said that Belgium violated the prohibition by returning an Afghan asylum seeker to Greece.134 Transferring Migrants to Known Abusive Conditions of Detention As mentioned previously, in the case of M.S.S. v. Belgium and Greece, the ECtHR found that detention conditions of migrants in Greece violate article 3 of the ECHR, which states, 131 Treaty of Lisbon amending the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty establishing the European Community, December 13, 2007 http://eur-lex.europa.eu/JOHtml.do?uri=OJ:C:2007:306:SOM:EN:HTML; The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, 2000/C 364/01, December 18, 2000, http://www.europarl.europa.eu/charter/pdf/text_en.pdf (both accessed April 13, 2011), Art. 6, para. 1. 132 Ibid. 133 Frontex, “Frontex Fundamental Rights Strategy,” March 31, 2011, para. 7. 134 Frontex specifically declared in its “Fundamental Rights Strategy” that the ECtHR human rights jurisprudence applies to its activities, Ibid. THE EU’S DIRTY HANDS 46

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