VI. The Fragmentation of EU Responsibilities
Member State Responsibility
Although participating states did not exercise operational command over their border
guards deployed with Frontex’s RABIT 2010, they were nonetheless accountable for human
rights violations that arose as a result of their co-operation with Greece. In several cases,
the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has established that the delegation of state
powers to international organizations is limited by the requirement that international
organizations adhere to human rights norms. Thus, when agents of participating states
knowingly transfer migrants to inhuman and degrading treatment, those countries, too, are
liable for violations of their international obligations.
EU member states and other participating European states, many of which have stopped
transferring migrants to Greece under the Dublin-II agreement in the wake of M.S.S. v
Belgium and Greece, should not turn a blind eye to what their border guards are doing
while deployed under the auspices of an EU agency.152 That RABIT border guards wear their
own national uniforms underlines that they act in the name of their home countries. In
order not to be complicit in inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees, participating
states should condition future involvement in RABIT and similar deployments on there
being no co-operation in activities which will lead to the ill-treatment of detainees.
Frontex and Greek Responsibility
In its analysis of Greece’s failures to address the protection emergency in Evros, the FRA
goes into some detail about what it calls “the fragmentation of responsibilities for
migration” in the Greek government.153 The agency makes some important points on the
lack of clarity on the coordination and the division of labor among several government
bureaus. But the fragmentation of responsibilities is not limited to the Greek domestic
authorities. It can also be applied to the division of labor among domestic and
international actors.
Traditionally, sovereign states have the primary responsibility for ensuring human rights.
On the other hand, Frontex has focused solely on enforcement. During RABIT 2010 this EU
152 On the importance of precedent in the ECtHR, and of national officials taking into account Convention rights, including
the jurisprudence on them, see Alec Stone Sweet and Helen Keller, “The Reception of the ECHR in National Legal Orders,” in
Keller and Stone Sweet, eds, A Europe of Rights (Oxford, 2008), p. 14.
153 FRA report, p. 14.
53
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH | SEPTEMBER 2011
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