Dutch former gendarmerie commander Hans Leijtens took the reins of Frontex with a vow to renew the EU border agency’s commitment to the rights of migrants. With Europe’s leaders taking a hard line on migration, is he fighting a losing battle?
When Fabrice Leggeri resigned from the European Union’s border agency, Frontex, in April 2022, Hans Leijtens was getting ready to retire.
Under Frenchman Leggeri, now a far-right MEP, Frontex had been accused by the bloc’s anti-fraud body, OLAF, of covering up a practice of illegally deterring migrants and refugees arriving on Greek shores – so-called ‘pushbacks’.
Leijtens was commander of the Royal Marechaussee, the Dutch gendarmerie that secures the country’s borders. Fifty-nine-years-old at the time, being tapped to repair Frontex’s tarnished reputation wasn’t the career move he had been planning.
“I had a fine career thus far and was about to retire; there was no need to make the next step,” he said in the context of a joint investigation led by BIRN. “For me, it’s really about the mission.”
Leijtens, who turned 62 in March, spoke in his glass-walled office on the 13th floor of a modern skyscraper in the plush Warsaw Spire complex in the Polish capital.
The view would give anyone an inflated sense of importance, but in Leijtens’s case it comes with a near 1-billion euro annual budget and a staff of 2,500 deployed across the continent.
It did not take long, however, for the true scale of his task to hit home.
On March 3, 2023, two days after he moved into his new office, a letter landed on the Dutchman’s desk.
It had been drafted by Jonas Grimheden, a Swede whose job it was to make sure Frontex was acting in accordance with the fundamental human rights that the EU says are at its heart, rights that the bloc had been accused of cherry-picking since the start of the so-called ‘migration crisis’ in late 2015.
The letter detailed concerns about “continuous and persisting allegations of irregular returns” – pushbacks – and “serious allegations of mistreatment” of migrants and refugees on EU member Bulgaria’s border with Turkey and the border with Serbia.
Grimheden wanted Leijtens to send the letter – requesting action to curb the violations – to the head of Bulgaria’s border police, at that time Rositsa Dimitrova.
Leijtens declined, giving an early indication of his reluctance to engage in confrontation with EU capitals.
It was only a matter of time, however, before he would be asked to take far tougher decisions about the balance of power between the EU’s border authority and its member states.
June 14, 2023: three-and-a-half months into Leijtens’s tenure, a fishing trawler named Adriana went down in international waters southwest of Pylos in the Peloponnese, in an area where the Greek coast guard has a responsibility to aid vessels in distress.
The trawler had left Libya days earlier, packed with an estimated 750 people mainly from war-ravaged Syria as well as Pakistan and Egypt. Amnesty and Human Rights Watch say over 600 drowned; the bodies of more than 500 were never recovered.
In February this year, an independent investigation set up by Greece’s Ombudsman recommended disciplinary charges against eight Greek coast guard officers for alleged dereliction of duty over the shipwreck, citing “serious and reprehensible omissions” in the search and rescue mission.
A Serious Incident Report, SIR, which Frontex officers are required to file in the event of a possible violation of the rights afforded migrants and refugees, cited survivors saying the Greek coast guard had tried to drag the boat out of Greece’s zone of search and rescue responsibility, causing the shipwreck.
Frontex, which cooperates closely with the Greek coast guard, distanced itself from the disaster, saying it offered Greek authorities aerial assistance three times but was either ignored or asked by Athens to direct the assistance elsewhere.
For Grimheden, the shipwreck was the last straw. Less than a month later, on July 10, he wrote to Leijtens, advising the Frontex executive director to “suspend or terminate” the agency’s work in Greece.
“Violations of fundamental rights committed by Greek authorities remain frequent and of serious nature,” Grimheden wrote.
He warned that Frontex’s strategy of “enhanced cooperation” to address the situation wasn’t working; Greek authorities continued to deny any wrongdoing and were failing to address very serious violations, “making the situation very likely to persist”, he wrote.
Leijtens, however, balked again.
Though winning praise for his efforts to restore the integrity of Frontex, critics say his softly-softly approach to member states accused of violating the rights of asylum seekers has effectively allowed violence and pushbacks to continue on the bloc’s external borders, as evidenced in a host of SIRs previously reviewed by BIRN.
Now, in an interview with Solomon, Leijtens has spoken of a “new approach”, one that could see Frontex refuse financing and withdraw hardware and staff when EU member states do not take action to improve their human rights records.
Stung by the fallout from the Pylos shipwreck, Greek authorities appeared to rein in the practice of pushbacks.
“This is evident in the numbers of the months following the Pylos shipwreck”, said Dimitris Choulis, a human rights lawyer on the island of Samos. “You can see that when the pushbacks stop, the camps progressively reach their capacity.”
The respite was short-lived, however, as reports surfaced of Greek coast guard vessels ramming boats carrying refugees and migrants across the Aegean from Turkey. Media have reported on at least seven such incidents since the June 2023 shipwreck, as well as two before it.
The frequency grew in the last months of 2024 and early 2025. According to media reports, at least nine people died in the incidents, which sometimes involved gunshots fired by coast guard officers.
The coast guard claims its vessels were the ones being rammed, despite video evidence to the contrary posted online by an Austrian activist.
Shown the video, in which women and children can be heard screaming in terror, Leijtens said he agreed that Frontex’s approach to Greece so far may have contributed to “a sense of impunity”.
When Leijtens took office, Frontex already had a plan in place to help Athens improve its human rights record.
In his July 2023 letter, however, Grimheden, Frontex’s Fundamental Rights Officer, or FRO, said the plan “has not led to changes” and called for the agency to activate Article 46, the nuclear option in the Frontex arsenal. Under Article 46, Frontex should withdraw from a country if serious violations are documented in a Frontex-supported operation.
Justifying his decision not to do so, Leijtens said in English: “The FRO’s position is his, but I have to make a different consideration, and take into account what is the effect of such a decision.”
Instead, Leijtens chose “engagement”, sticking with the strategy that more Frontex, not less, was the best way to rein in the use of force at the EU’s borders.
“For me, it all starts with engagement and admitting that things are wrong,” he said, in reference to his initial thinking. Two years on, Leijtens told Solomon he had grown “impatient” with Greece, one of the countries, he said, that keeps him “awake at night”.
A “new approach” was needed, he said, one that would involve what several sources Solomon spoke to described as the “calibrated” use of Article 46 – giving Leijtens the green light to withhold financing for border hardware or withdraw resources if Greece fails to take steps to improve its approach towards the rights of migrants and refugees arriving on its shores.
Currently, Frontex has hundreds of border officers in Greece, as well as boats, cars, mobile surveillance systems, thermal cameras and drones.
The original plan was declared finished in January 2025, but Leijtens said the Greeks had implemented some of its measures only “in a formalistic manner”; cameras, for example, were installed on coast guard vessels to record potential abuses, but they weren’t turned on.
“I already told the Greeks: those remaining points are not rocket science. I want them fulfilled before we talk about the next cooperation,” said Leijtens.
“If it’s not done, I will not co-finance Greek vessels.”
He also said he had drafted an “escalation ladder” with Grimheden, setting out potential “next steps” if Greece is deemed uncooperative.
According to Frontex documents seen by Solomon, the first rung on the ‘ladder’ is communication of Frontex concerns to members states, followed by deadlines for goals to be met, then a halt to Frontex financing of hardware or staff and, finally, the termination of Frontex activities in part or in full.
“This is de facto Article 46,” Leijtens said. “I do not have to invoke Article 46; I can just make choices based on it.”
Leijtens’s patience with Greece might be wearing thin, but he is more optimistic when it comes to neighbouring Bulgaria, another country of concern to Grimheden and his office.
Ever since he took office, reports of “illegal practices” documented by the FRO in Bulgaria have been piling up on Leijtens’s desk, including details of violent pushbacks and other inhuman and degrading treatment of migrants by Bulgarian border police.
Since mid-2024, according to internal documents seen by BIRN, Solomon, and Pointer, Grimheden has been trying to negotiate an “action plan” with Bulgaria setting out “specific measures and indicators” that might improve the human rights situation.
In February that year, Leijtens announced a tripling of the Frontex presence on the ground in Bulgaria, effectively doubling down on the strategy of “enhanced cooperation” that had failed in Greece. Leijtens said the situation was simply “different”.
“I feel that with the [Bulgarian] chief of the border guards, we have a different discussion,” he told Solomon. “It feels different.” The current chief is Anton Zlatanov.
Humanitarian organisations on the ground do not share his optimism.
“The border police departments at the Bulgarian-Turkish border are an enclave within the country,” said Diana Dimova, director of Mission Wings, which reports on rights violations at the Bulgarian-Turkish border.
“What is being reported to Sofia and to our Western partners does not correspond to the reality on the ground,” she told Solomon. “Frontex is rarely seen during border incidents. According to our information, Frontex officers are still intentionally kept away from the pushback hot spots.”
Leijtens is pursuing a similar approach in Bulgaria’s neighbour, Serbia, which is not a member of the EU.
Last year, Frontex signed a “status agreement” with Belgrade, ramping up cooperation on “migration and border management”. At the time, the FRO was reporting in often graphic detail about allegations of violence meted out by Serbian police against migrants and refugees trying to cross from Bulgaria.
In one case from January 2024, a group of migrants apprehended by Serbian border police were stripped naked in the courtyard of a police station then driven to a forest, “where each migrant was beaten while stepping out of the vehicle and forced to pile up on one another”.
Police officers then beat them with “police batons, also punching and kicking them for approximately 30-40 minutes”, according to a report issued by Grimheden’s office in July and obtained by Solomon.
Leijtens’s strategy, at least in Bulgaria and Serbia – that more Frontex, not less, will help safeguard human rights at Europe’s borders – rests in large part on the willingness and ability of Frontex officers to not only flag serious human rights breaches when they witness them but to intervene when they are happening.
The Frontex boss acknowledged, however, that it was a work in progress.
“Both in the field, but also here in headquarters”, he said, some Frontex staff are still reluctant to speak out.
Leijtens attributed this to a perception among some border guards that to do so amounts to “snitching” and “betraying your colleagues”.
In the case of Frontex, he said, “it was even worse”.
“It had repercussions in the past. There was a power game being played here inside the agency. People were suppressed.”
A number of Solomon’s interlocutors during the reporting of this story credited Leijtens with making a genuine effort to confront the problems he inherited, and for allowing Frontex’s inhouse rights watchdog to exercise its mandate more effectively.
Among them was Federica Toscano, Save the Children’s representative on the Frontex Consultative Forum, a fundamental rights advisory body to the agency.
After Leijtens’s arrival, Toscano said, “there was significantly more openness toward the Consultative Forum and an effort to build a strong collaboration with both the Forum and the Fundamental Rights Officer, enabling its office to carry out its work more effectively”.
“Since taking office, Leijtens has been outspoken about the importance of operating with full respect for fundamental rights and has been cautious about expanding operations where this might pose a challenge.”
Despite the more cautious approach, ‘under-reporting’ remains a problem.
In August 2024, Grimheden’s office found that during an alleged pushback involving a Frontex-deployed Bulgarian vessel off the Greek island of Lesvos, neither the Greek authorities nor the Frontex crew reported the incident properly.
The FRO only learned of it when an NGO submitted a video of the incident filmed by migrants at sea as they were chased by a Greek coast guard vessel.
A string of similar reports by the FRO since Leijtens took charge shows Frontex officers are still regularly failing to report pushbacks and other abuses to HQ in Warsaw or, in the case of operations in Bulgaria, are being intimidated by their Bulgarian counterparts into keeping quiet.
It is not enough merely to be present, said Toscano.
“Has Frontex’s presence over the past two years truly reduced violations of fundamental rights? Unfortunately, reports of violence, pushbacks, and mistreatment, including towards children, as repeatedly documented by Save the Children, persist at the borders where Frontex operates,” Toscano said. “I’m certainly not blaming Leijtens directly for this. He has made some efforts to improve oversight, but it is difficult to say that the agency’s presence has made a difference.”
Asked if he expects his officers to intervene when confronted with human rights abuses, Leijtens told Solomon: “I would expect that if someone sees something happening that is not according to standard that they act.”
In the heat of the moment, however, doing so “is not easy”, he said. “I also try to envision how I would do it. To be very frank with you, I cannot say right now I would intervene.”
“I don’t want to be very ivory-tower smart about this,” Leijtens said. “It is difficult. I expect them to step up… At least what I want them to do is report, to let us know what happened. That’s the least.”
Shortly after taking up his post, Leijtens vowed “there is nothing secret about Frontex”, reflecting a widely-held view that the agency’s record on transparency had to improve post-Leggeri.
Frontex, however, has refused a Freedom of Information request submitted by Solomon for details of a formal opinion issued by Grimheden in January 2024 concerning “underreporting and protecting reporting persons”. It also withheld a June 2024 opinion by Grimheden on Bulgaria.
When BIRN complained, the then European Ombudsperson, Emily O’Reilly, faulted Frontex for “maladministration” in refusing access to the documents. Its justification for non-disclosure, she said, was at “odds with a culture of openness”.
A similar wall of secrecy surrounds a host of documents requested by Solomon via FOI requests concerning Leijtens’s exchanges with Greek authorities, his deliberations with Grimheden, minutes of Frontex’s management board meetings and mission reports by FRO monitors deployed to Bulgaria.
Ultimately, Leijtens’s success depends on the cooperation of member states and the degree to which the Commission, the EU’s executive arm, has his back.
Toscano said it was naive to think that boots on the ground would be enough to deter national police forces from robbing and beating would-be asylum seekers, or pushing them back over borders.
“You can have eyes and ears, but if you don’t have a mouth, what is the impact?” she asked. “In the sense that the agency has the potential to hold countries accountable for fundamental rights, but so far, that potential remains largely unrealised.”
In the end, some critics say Leijtens is doomed to fail so long as Europe’s leaders maintain a hard line on migration. Pushbacks might be illegal and ugly, but it is no exaggeration to say that some EU member states consider them necessary.
“Leitjens is committed to the law but he inherited a poisoned chalice,” said Sophie in ‘t Veld, a compatriot of the Frontex boss and who spent years scrutinising the agency’s work as a member of the European Parliament until 2024 and is now a member of the pro-European political movement Volt.
“As European leaders are preoccupied with being tough on migration, Leijtens has no leverage to really push member states on fundamental rights,” she said. “And lawlessness and impunity continues at Europe’s external borders.”
This investigation was led by BIRN in collaboration with Solomon and Pointer.
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