The EU border agency is spending another quarter of a billion on Israeli long-range drones. This unmanned aerial surveillance is being expanded with expensive high-flying technology.
The EU border agency Frontex has significantly expanded its drone surveillance for migration control in the Mediterranean. While 3307 flight hours were registered in 2023, the number rose to 4993 flight hours in 2024 – an increase of more than 50 per cent. These are the latest figures provided by Frontex to MEP Özlem Demirel from the Left Party in the EU Parliament. Frontex had already continuously increased the number of surveillance flights in the years before 2023.
The flights are carried out with two long-range drones: 2137 flight hours were accounted for by a contract for an aircraft in Malta and a further 2856 for one in Crete. This contract was renewed in 2024 with a budget of €184.2 million. The agency extended the existing two-year framework contract for Malta for the second time with a volume of €75 million.
As in 2023, Frontex is thus spending a considerable part of its annual budget – for 2024 this amounted to €922 million – on drone services. The main contractor is the Bremen-based armaments division of Airbus. If the contract conditions are not met by the German company, the defence contractor Leonardo-Finmeccanica could be considered as an alternative supplier. The Italian aerospace company had unsuccessfully sued Frontex for damages before the EU Court of Justice in 2022, claiming that the first tender for ‘remotely piloted aerial systems for maritime air surveillance’ had been too specific and had therefore excluded the European supplier. The court ruled that the claim was inadmissible.
The Frontex surveillance drones of the Heron 1 type are ordered by Airbus from IAI in Israel. All data collected is transmitted in real time to the Frontex headquarters in Warsaw and to the relevant maritime control centres in Malta and Greece. If the drones detect boats with migrants, Frontex also informs the controversial Libyan coastguard, which then carries out so-called pullback operations – intercepting and returning refugee boats to Libya, where the people end up in torture camps.
Frontex is planning to expand European border surveillance with so-called pseudo-satellites. These high-flying platforms are to operate permanently in the stratosphere in future. Spain is the first country to deploy the expensive technology over the Atlantic to detect boat movements between West Africa and the Canary Islands at an early stage.
Published in German in „nd“.
Image: A “Heron 1” drone flown since 2010 by the German army in Afghanistan. Its former contractor Airbus is now deploying the same model for Frontex (Rheinmetall).
