The EU border agency Frontex will end border surveillance operations in Lithuania — and has implied a desire to return to Hungary.
The Warsaw-based agency’s acting executive director Aija Kalnāja told MEPs on Tuesday (12 July) that it will no longer help Vilnius with border surveillance.
“As from tomorrow (13 July), we will not be participating or supporting Lithuania with the border surveillance,” she said.
The move follows a ruling by the European Court of Justice against Lithuania in late June.
The court faulted Lithuania’s legislation, which allowed for mass detention and stymied asylum requests. The case primarily dealt with migrants trying to enter Lithuania irregularly from Belarus in November 2021.
But Kalnāja said the withdrawal decision was not linked to the court ruling, noting the plan to stop border surveillance operations in Lithuania had been made prior to its publication.
“We need to shift personnel from quieter areas to the Central Med,” she said instead.
She also said Frontex would retain an operational footprint in Lithuania, noting agents will still be working border checks.
And the agency’s press services said it was a request by the Lithuanians to reduce the number of Frontex officers deployed in the country as the situation at the border with Belarus has stabilised.
There are currently 18 Frontex officers working at Lithuania’s external borders, performing first and second line border check activities and cross-border crime detection, it said.
Amnesty International, an NGO, says Lithuania had arbitrarily detained thousands of people in militarised centres.
Some were tortured, they said.
The agency’s fundamental rights officer, Jonas Grimheden, said they had flagged the abuse in Lithuania last autumn and then again earlier this year.
He said the agency failed to act on it.
“We could have avoided a lot of problems in Lithuania, if the agency would have acted on the opinion from back then,” he said.
