Once again, the report by an official body highlights the loophole in the European Union’s migration policy. Once again, it has been scientifically migrants who have paid with their lives that expensive loophole. On this occasion, the European Ombudsman drew the colours of Frontex, a dark European organisation that he allegedly should make coastal.

On 14 June last year there was one of the largest disasters in the Mediterranean between Greece and Italy, near Pilos. The old Adriana fishing boat, which was leaving Libya and carrying 720 migrants, was a few days off course, and in the end some 600 people were flown and killed, only 120 shipwrecks survived and the bodies of 78 were recovered; the rest were considered missing, devoured by the sea.

A month later, the newspaper The Guardian, the German public broadcaster NDR and the Greek media Solomon, investigated the disaster. To do so, they interviewed witnesses and used cutting-edge technologies, in collaboration with the company Forensis. The conclusion was that the ship turned when the Greek guards wanted to take the boat with a rope to the waters under Italian jurisdiction, after which the shipwrecks did not receive any help for long hours.

Emily O’Reilly, European Ombudsman, also opened the investigation in July and eight months later has borne fruit. He points out that Frontex offered assistance to the Greek authorities four times, but by not receiving a reply he did nothing, being aware that the migrants were in serious danger.

Saving lives cannot be an opportunity for Frontex

O’Reilly believes that the case shows that Frontex does not have enough ‘instruments’ to be able to intervene in such cases, as it must wait for authorisation from one of the Member States before providing assistance.

But the Ombudsman believes that in an emergency, it is up to every organization to help migrants, and recalls what the President of the European Commission himself, Ursula Von der Leyen, said in the European Parliament in 2020: “Saving lives at sea is not an opportunity.”

Frontex was “very aware” of how the Greek authorities deal with migrants arriving by sea on its shores: “Your performance doesn’t start from scratch,” he says. However, the current regulations "prevented" him from playing a more active role in the Adriana accident.

O’Reilly is very critical of the direction and behaviour of the European Union in the processing of marine salvage. He recalled that since the end of the Mare Nostrum plan in Italy in 2014, the EU has not put in place any other rescue plan and that since then European countries have been trying to alienate migrants while persecuting the NGOs that help them.

Furthermore, although the EU assigned Frontex the role of “coastal”, “this is not the case”. The European Border and Coast Agency receives large amounts of EUR 850 million, but most of them go to the expulsion of migrants and border control, and corruption has also occurred within the organisation.

The worst thing is that, after all these months, no change has been made to resolve this situation, and the local ombudsman does not reject the repetition of a disaster such as that of the Adriana fishing vessel.