The Commission’s Frontex reform would build a 30,000-strong border agency with a returns centre and a social media unit. Its published summary says nothing about rescue, in a year when fewer people are reaching Europe by sea but more of them are dying on the way.

The European Commission has tabled the most ambitious Frontex reform since the agency gained executive powers in 2019. Published on 27 October, the proposal would lift the standing corps to 30,000 officers by 2041, create a Return Coordination Centre, add a Quick Reaction Force, and open an Online Monitoring and Response Centre to track border trends on social media. That corps would be three times the 2019 target of 10,000 officers, and the draft budget for 2028 to 2034 sets aside close to €11.9 billion, nearly double the agency’s allocation for 2021 to 2027.

Read the Commission’s own summary of the plan and one word never appears: rescue.

That omission matters because of what the sea is recording this year. Figures from the International Organization for Migration’s Missing Migrants Project show 70,598 people reaching Europe by the Mediterranean and Atlantic routes between 1 January and 12 October, a fall of 36 percent on the same period in 2025. Across those months, deaths and disappearances rose from 2,237 to 2,437.

The Case for a Border-First Agency

The argument behind the Frontex reform deserves a fair hearing. Member states have spent a decade complaining that too few rejected applicants leave. The Commission reports that irregular crossings have dropped 55 percent in two years and that the return rate now exceeds 30 percent. The summer’s events in Ceuta showed how quickly a frontier can be overwhelmed. A larger, faster, better equipped agency answers a demand that governments of left and right have voiced repeatedly in the Council. Defending the plan before Parliament’s civil liberties committee on 4 November, Commissioner Magnus Brunner said every Frontex operation in a third country would require an agreement approved by Parliament, and MEPs from the centre-right and right welcomed its budget and returns role.

There is also a legal objection to mixing missions. Rescue at sea falls under the International Convention on Maritime Search and Rescue, and national rescue centres coordinate it. Frontex has long maintained that its founding regulation gives it no direct rescue mandate. In 2024 its executive director, Hans Leijtens, put it bluntly: “We are not the European Search and Rescue Agency.” On this view, asking a border body to run rescue would blur lines that international law draws on purpose.

What the Numbers Actually Show

The difficulty is that current policy is succeeding by the measure it chose and failing by the test that counts most. On the central Mediterranean route, arrivals in Italy and Malta fell by about 55 percent to 24,455, while recorded deaths climbed from 921 to 1,006. Set against arrivals, that is roughly one death for every 24 people who landed, compared with about one in 59 a year earlier. In the eastern Mediterranean the ratio moved from one in 102 to one in 49. A caution belongs here: deaths per arrival are not the odds of dying on a crossing, since arrival figures cannot show how many people set out.

Weather also plays its part. The IOM reported in August that more than half of the central Mediterranean deaths in the first four months of the year occurred in January, when Cyclone Harry struck. It also cites overcrowded boats, wider use of rubber dinghies, and smugglers launching in dangerous conditions. Alongside those factors it lists gaps in rescue capacity. Only that last cause sits within Europe’s direct control, and the Frontex reform leaves it untouched.

The EU’s own Fundamental Rights Agency stated in July that rescue capacity at sea cannot respond effectively to the number of people attempting the crossing on unseaworthy vessels. The same review notes that NGO ships increasingly receive alerts from Frontex. In practice, the agency already sees the emergencies from the air. It then passes the response to others, among them Libyan authorities whom FRA records using force against civilian rescuers.

That dependence reaches beyond one agency. As funding and partnership deals move more of Europe’s border work into Libyan and Tunisian waters, responsibility does not stop where EU jurisdiction does, and letting Frontex operate in third countries makes that harder to ignore.

A Watchdog Shrinks as the Agency Grows

The second gap concerns accountability. The European Ombudsman’s inquiry into the June 2023 Pylos shipwreck, in which 82 bodies were recovered and hundreds more passengers remain presumed dead, found that existing rules left Frontex too reliant on national authorities. It also found that the agency’s own fundamental rights monitors had too little say in decisions on maritime emergencies. The Ombudsman urged reflection on changes to the agency’s mandate that would allow a more proactive rescue role.

The October Frontex reform moves the other way. Under Article 98 of the proposal, the agency’s Fundamental Rights Office would close an investigation as soon as its preliminary findings show that no member of a Frontex team was involved, passing the relevant information to national bodies. Complaints about national officers already take that route. What the change removes is an independent European assessment of incidents in which the host country’s own guards act alone.

That leaves a question the draft does not answer: who investigates when the national authority is itself under suspicion? The record is not encouraging. The Fundamental Rights Agency counted 192 national disciplinary investigations into alleged rights violations at borders between 2020 and 2025, and none concluded in 2025 produced a sanction. An agency set to deploy 30,000 officers, operate in third countries, and help carry out returns between non-EU states would answer to a thinner check than it does today.

Dutch Green MEP Tineke Strik warned that working with third countries without proper oversight threatens fundamental rights. One need not share her politics to see the arithmetic: more powers, fewer safeguards.

What Parliament and Council Should Write Into the Frontex Reform

None of this requires turning a border agency into a coast guard. It requires three amendments that the co-legislators can make during the talks ahead.

First, the Frontex reform should close the gap upstream. The recast keeps the agency’s existing task of supporting search and rescue operations, and Regulation 656/2014 already binds every unit in a Frontex sea operation, ships and aircraft alike, to alert the responsible rescue centre and proteczt people in distress. That rule, however, covers only units under a member state’s responsibility. Aircraft the agency operates under its own contracts, and detections made through its surveillance services, are not clearly covered by it. The proposal itself confines the agency’s surveillance role, where people in distress are spotted, to passing that information to rescue authorities. The reform should extend the same duty to them and oblige the agency to direct the nearest available asset to the scene, under the competent rescue centre’s coordination, as the SAR Convention requires.

Second, negotiators should keep the Fundamental Rights Office’s power to examine national officers deployed in Frontex operations, let it open inquiries on its own initiative, and require the Executive Director to act on its recommendations to suspend operations.

Third, the agency’s annual risk analysis should publish deaths per arrival alongside crossing figures, route by route. A 55 percent drop in crossings already features in the Commission’s case as evidence of success. A central Mediterranean death ratio that has more than doubled deserves equal space in the same document.

The Measure of a Border

Europe is entitled to decide who enters its territory, and nothing in this critique of the Frontex reform disputes that. The Commission is also right that a credible return policy belongs inside a credible asylum system. Yet a border policy that books fewer arrivals as progress while the share of travellers drowning climbs is tracking what it can manage and setting aside what it would rather not publish.

As drafted, the Frontex reform describes an agency that watches, intercepts, and returns. Over the coming months of negotiation, Parliament and the Council can still add the one verb the Commission left out.