Evaluations of Frontex operations

La demande est partiellement réussie.

Dear European Border and Coast Guard Agency,

Under the right of access to documents in the EU treaties, as developed in Regulation 1049/2001, I am requesting:

For all Frontex operations conducted during the years 2013, 2014 and 2015:

All documents related to the evaluation Frontex operations, including:

- The final evaluation document, including all annexes;

- All correspondence - including, but not limited to, letters, e-mails, and any attachments - exchanged between Frontex and Member States representatives in the framework of the evaluation process;

- A list of all meetings held by Frontex and Member States representatives in the framework of the evaluation process; and

- For any and all of the above-mentioned meetings: all minutes of these meetings, or any kind of record of the proceeding of these meetings.

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you need any clarification in regards to any aspect of my request.

Thank you in advance.

Yours faithfully,

Luisa Izuzquiza

PAD, Agence européenne pour la gestion de la coopération opérationnelle aux frontières extérieures

Dear Ms Izuzquiza,

We acknowledge receipt of your application CMS-2018-00009-0433 for public access to Frontex documents. Before we are able to process your application, we have to inform you that this and you application (CMS-2018-00009-0434) pertain to a significant number of documents (a preliminary estimate concluded upper several ten thousand pages). We would thus invite you to develop, similar to previous cases, a fair solution in order to reconcile your needs with those of good administration.

Furthermore, by adhering to the principle of good administration and in the interest of transparency, we would like to inform you that the redaction required from Frontex under Article 4 of Regulation (EC) 1049/2001 and the hardcopies that are going to be produced in its course, oblige us to charge 20 cent per page plus postage. Should you agree with these conditions, we would proceed carrying out an approximate calculation of the expected costs and communicate it to you beforehand in order to allow you to make the disbursement of the fees.

We are looking forward to finding a fair solution that would accommodate your needs and enable us to organize. We would in any case welcome a phone conversation in this regard.

Yours sincerely,

Transparency Office
Corporate Governance
Tel: +48 22 205 95 00

Frontex - European Border and Coast Guard Agency

www.frontex.europa.eu
Plac Europejski 6, 00-844 Warsaw, Poland · Tel: +48 22 205 9500 · Fax: +48 22 205 9501
DISCLAIMER: This e-mail message, including any attachments, cannot be construed as automatically constituting any form of commitment by Frontex, unless its contents clearly indicate otherwise. It is intended solely for the use of the addressee(s). Any unauthorised disclosure, use or dissemination, either in whole or in part, is prohibited. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately via e-mail and delete the e-mail from your system.

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Dear Frontex,

Thank you for your message. While I understand that my application covers a large number of documents, and while I may be willing to find a fair solution (in line with the solutions Frontex has agreed to before, in multiple occasions - for an overview please see: https://www.asktheeu.org/en/body/frontex ) that would enable you to handle the processing of my request in a proportionate manner, I cannot agree to the costs that you are suggesting.

I am absolutely sure that Frontex can find a way to redact the documents falling under the scope of my application without having to produce hard copies.

As a matter of fact, in the year 2018, to adhere to the principle of good administration rather means to find an effective, digital way of redacting documents that does not require the printing and scanning of pages, thus avoiding the unnecessary environmental cost and the loss of time the production of hard copies entail, let alone putting a price to EU citizens' exercise of their fundamental right of access to EU documents.

Wishing that Frontex will reconsider its initial offer, I remain at your disposal for an alternative fair solution.

Yours sincerely,

Luisa Izuzquiza

PAD, Agence européenne pour la gestion de la coopération opérationnelle aux frontières extérieures

Dear Ms Izuzquiza,

Thank you for willingness to find a fair solution with regard to your recent applications. As indicated in our email of 20 September 2018, our preliminary estimate concluded that your applications CMS-2018-00009-0434 and CMS-2018-00009-0433 pertain to documents comprising several ten thousands of pages. The retrieval of such amount of documents and their necessary redaction we are required to conduct under Article 4 of Regulation (EC) 1049/2001 would very substantially paralyse the proper working of several units within Frontex, as well as impact on our possibility to exercise our mandate. Moreover, it could deprive other EU citizens or residents from exercising their fundamental right of access to EU documents and jeopardise fair treatment of all applicants which Frontex is committed to.
We would thus kindly invite you to reconsider the scope of your request and/or to indicate those areas of your wide applications you could consider narrowing down.

In regard to the secure redaction as required from Frontex under Article 4 of Regulation (EC) 1049/2001 no adequate solution to avoid the production of hardcopies which can be used on a regular basis is yet to be found.
If the possible modification of your applications would not result in a significant reduction of pages, Frontex would be obliged to charge for those pages that cannot be made available in electronic format.

We are looking forward to hearing from you or to discuss your applications by other means to identify possibilities together with you to determine a fair solution.

Yours sincerely,

Transparency Office
Corporate Governance
Tel: +48 22 205 95 00

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Dear Frontex,

Thank you for your message. In view of your arguments, I would like to narrow down the scope of my application as follows:

For all Frontex operations conducted during the year 2015:

All documents related to the evaluation Frontex operations, including:

- The final evaluation document, including all annexes;

- All correspondence - including, but not limited to, letters, e-mails, and any attachments - exchanged between Frontex and Member States representatives in the framework of the evaluation process;

- A list of all meetings held by Frontex and Member States representatives in the framework of the evaluation process; and

- For any and all of the above-mentioned meetings: all minutes of these meetings, or any kind of record of the proceeding of these meetings.

I hope Frontex will find this a suitable solution.

Best regards,

Luisa

PAD, Agence européenne pour la gestion de la coopération opérationnelle aux frontières extérieures

Dear Ms Izuzquiza,

Thank you for your proposal. However, the documents identified regarding your applications CMS-2018-00009-0434 concerning Oplans of all 2014 operations and CMS-2018-00009-0433 concerning the evaluation of Frontex operations in 2015 amount to at least 5,500 pages for CMS-2018-00009-0434 and at least 7,500 pages for CMS-2018-00009-0433 (based on a preliminary appraisal). Notwithstanding the fact that we would have to levy the costs for producing and sending the copies for those parts requiring redaction under Article 4 of Regulation (EC) 1049/2001, this amount of pages would still very substantially paralyse the proper working of several units within Frontex, as well as impact on our possibility to exercise our mandate. Moreover, it would deprive other EU citizens or residents from exercising their fundamental right of access to EU documents and jeopardise fair treatment of all applicants which Frontex is committed to.

We are thus inviting you to again to consider a further narrowing down and/or focussing on a specific topic to commonly determine a fair solution.

Yours sincerely,

Transparency Office
Corporate Governance
Tel: +48 22 205 95 00

Frontex - European Border and Coast Guard Agency

www.frontex.europa.eu
Plac Europejski 6, 00-844 Warsaw, Poland · Tel: +48 22 205 9500 · Fax: +48 22 205 9501
DISCLAIMER: This e-mail message, including any attachments, cannot be construed as automatically constituting any form of commitment by Frontex, unless its contents clearly indicate otherwise. It is intended solely for the use of the addressee(s). Any unauthorised disclosure, use or dissemination, either in whole or in part, is prohibited. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately via e-mail and delete the e-mail from your system.

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Dear Frontex,

Thank you for your message. Nonetheless, for me to be able to further narrow down the scope of my request I would need Frontex to provide a list of documents covered by my request, with a more concrete estimate of the number of pages per each of those documents. Can Frontex please provide such a list?

Otherwise the efforts to reduce the scope of this request can only be based on random, bling guessing, resulting in a waste of both my and Frontex's time.

Thank you in advance.

Yours sincerely,

Luisa Izuzquiza

PAD, Agence européenne pour la gestion de la coopération opérationnelle aux frontières extérieures

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Dear Ms Izuzquiza,

 

Further to your offer to narrow down the scope of the application
regarding evaluation documents for the 2015, please see below an overview
of the documents with more a closer approximation:

 

1. Air Borders

  FP Air 2015 – Regular FP Air 2015 – Vega Pegasus
Officers Intermediate Managers Alexis 2015 Children 2015
2015
Invitation Letters/correspondence: Letters/correspondence: Invitation Invitation Invitation
letters with 56 Pages to MS/TC: 39 Pages to MS/TC: letters: 6 letters: 5 letters: 3
all annexes answers 169 pages answers 141 pages Pages to 21 Pages to 18 Pages to
to MS MS: 126 MS: 90 pages 11 MS: 33
Letter Invitation Invitation Briefings: 5 pages
Briefings: 5 Pages Pages 126 x 2 Invitation
Phases: 252 Briefings:  
pages 10 Pages x 2
phases: 20
Invitation Pages
Briefings:
13 Pages x
2 phases:
26 Pages
PPTs of all 89 Pages (5 PPT): 68 Pages (4 PPT) Briefings: Briefings: 27 Pages
stakeholders 128 Pages 146 Pages (7 (2 PPT)
during     (4 PPT) x 2 PPT)
evaluation Phases  
meetings Briefing: X 2 phases:
256 (8 PPT) 292 pages
(14 PPt)
Debriefing:
28 Pages (3 Debriefings:
PPT) x 2 21 pages (2
phases: 56 PPT) x 2
pages (6 phases: 42
PPT) Pages (4
PPt)
Total 319 253 590 444 60
           

 

2. Sea Borders

  Poseidon Triton 2015 Indalo Minerva Hera FP Sea 2015
2015 2015 2015 2015
Invitation 9 pages (to 5 pages (to 15 pages 10 pages Common 12 pages
letters with 35 35 sent to 12 (to 15 with (to 20
all annexes recipients) recipients) recipients recipients) Indalo recipients)
to MS
PPTs of all 374 pages 227 pages 210 pages 71 pages (6 34 71 pages (5
stakeholders (13 PPT) (in 8 PPTs) (in 7 PPT) pages PPT)
during PPTs) (in 1
evaluation PPT)
meetings

 

3. Land Borders

(very rough estimation) of the amount of pages involved in the following
categories for evaluation on land operations in 2015:

 

3.1 correspondence related to evaluation

- communication with the internal stakeholders representing different
entities participating in the evaluation    - 30 pages (without the PPTs)

- invitation package - 3 separate sets 20 pages each (to Host MSs, to Home
MSs, to Third Countries)=60 pages plus 2 packages to IOs (10 pages
each)=20 pages and 1 package to CIES – 20 pages, in total 100 pages

- attendance lists with the registration forms including the content of
registration communication - 100 pages plus 50 pages more related to
registration additional communication – 150 pages

- reimbursement claims with the supporting financial documents - the
average number of the pages in the financial claim package is about 10
pages -in total approx. 300 pages (including FX checklist for payment,
application for reimbursement, reimbursement rules, flight e-ticket,
flight invoice, boarding passes, hotel invoices, credit card payment
proof,  additional statements on mileage reimbursement etc)

3.2  number of meetings related to evaluation - 1 meeting for all land
border operations 2015

- minutes of evaluation meetings – 8 pages document

- powerpoint presentations – 200 pages

 

4. Final Evaluation Reports

The total final evaluation reports amount to approximately 800 pages

 

 

As indicated in our earlier correspondence and notwithstanding the fact
that we would have to levy the costs for producing and sending the copies
for those parts requiring redaction under Article 4 of Regulation (EC)
1049/2001, this amount of pages would still very substantially paralyse
the proper working of several units within Frontex, as well as impact on
our possibility to exercise our mandate. Moreover, it would deprive other
EU citizens or residents from exercising their fundamental right of access
to EU documents and jeopardise fair treatment of all applicants which
Frontex is committed to.

 

Based on this information, e are thus inviting you to reconsider a further
narrowing down and/or focussing on a specific topic to commonly determine
a fair solution.

 

Yours sincerely,

 

Transparency Office

Corporate Governance

Tel: +48 22 205 95 00

 

 

 

Frontex - European Border and Coast Guard Agency · Plac Europejski 6,
00-844 Warsaw, Poland · Tel: +48 22 205 9500 · Fax: +48 22 205 9501 ·
[1]www.frontex.europa.eu

DISCLAIMER: This e-mail message, including any attachments, cannot be
construed as automatically constituting any form of commitment by Frontex,
unless its contents clearly indicate otherwise. It is intended solely for
the use of the addressee(s). Any unauthorised disclosure, use or
dissemination, either in whole or in part, is prohibited. If you have
received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately via
e-mail and delete the e-mail from your system.

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Dear Frontex,

Many thanks for this detailed response, which was very useful indeed. I would like to therefore further narrow down the scope of my initial request to the following documents:

For Joint Operation Triton 2015:
- all invitation letters with all annexes to MS;
- all PPTs of all stakeholders during evaluation meetings; and
- the final evaluation report.

As well as:
- the minutes of the evaluation meeting held for all land border operations 2015.

Hoping Frontex will find this a suitable solution,

With best regards,

Luisa Izuzquiza

PAD, Agence européenne pour la gestion de la coopération opérationnelle aux frontières extérieures

Dear Ms Izuzqiuza,

In regard to your application for "all invitation letters with all annexes to MS", please be informed that the information contained in the invitations to the respective MS does only deviate in minor elements. Could you thus consider only receiving one letter as a sample, which formed the basis for the remaining letters?

Yours sincerely,

Transparency Office
Corporate Governance
Tel: +48 22 205 95 00

Frontex - European Border and Coast Guard Agency

www.frontex.europa.eu
Plac Europejski 6, 00-844 Warsaw, Poland · Tel: +48 22 205 9500 · Fax: +48 22 205 9501
DISCLAIMER: This e-mail message, including any attachments, cannot be construed as automatically constituting any form of commitment by Frontex, unless its contents clearly indicate otherwise. It is intended solely for the use of the addressee(s). Any unauthorised disclosure, use or dissemination, either in whole or in part, is prohibited. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately via e-mail and delete the e-mail from your system.

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Dear Frontex,

Yes, that would be fine. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Luisa

PAD, Agence européenne pour la gestion de la coopération opérationnelle aux frontières extérieures

Dear Ms Izuzquiza,

Further to your application for access to Frontex documents, our endeavour to find a fair solution and our agreement of 26 October 2018 regarding the application for the following Frontex documents

For Joint Operation Triton 2015:
- one invitation letter with all annexes sent to one MS;
- all PPTs of all stakeholders during evaluation meetings; and
- the final evaluation report.

As well as:
- the minutes of the evaluation meeting held for all land border operations 2015.

We herewith register your application and would like to inform you that since your application falls under the regime of Regulation (EC) No 1049/2001 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 30 May 2001 regarding public access to European Parliament, Council and Commission documents, we will now commence the processing of your application and will reply within 15 working days.

Please do not hesitate to contact us with any question you may have.

Yours sincerely,

Transparency Office
+48 22 205 9500
[email address]

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PAD, Agence européenne pour la gestion de la coopération opérationnelle aux frontières extérieures

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Dear Ms Izuzquiza,

Please find enclosed our response, which you will receive in two batches. This is Batch 1.

In case of any questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

Yours sincerely,

Transparency Office
Corporate Governance
Tel: +48 22 205 9500

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PAD, Agence européenne pour la gestion de la coopération opérationnelle aux frontières extérieures

1 Attachment

Dear Ms Izuzquiza,

Please find enclosed our response, which you will receive in two batches. This is Batch 2

In case of questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Yours sincerely,

Transparency Office
Corporate Governance
Tel: +48 22 205 9500

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