The cooperation arrangement will help both agencies improve important aspects of their work. The EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) will, through its expertise, assist Frontex in further and comprehensively integrating the fundamental rights approach into its activities, as called for in numerous recent Council and Parliament communications, while Frontex will provide logistical, organisational and technical support to FRA's work in collecting border-related information on the situation of fundamental rights across the EU to achieve its goal of providing evidence-based advice to policymakers and practitioners.
"The respect for fundamental rights is an essential component of modern border management", added Morten Kjaerum. "We can work together to foster a common European understanding of fundamental rights and enhance transparency to reinforce accountably and monitoring of forced returns."
While there has already been fruitful Frontex-FRA cooperation on an ad hoc basis, predominantly in the context of training and research activities, the cooperation arrangement will provide a clear framework with which to support the enhancement of this and future work.
For further information, please contact the FRA media team:
E-mail: media@fra.europa.eu
Tel.: +43 1 58 030 - 642
Notes to editors
The FRA has three key functions:
- to collect information and data on fundamental rights; - to provide evidence-based advice to the EU and its Member States; - to promote dialogue with civil society in order to raise public awareness of fundamental rights.
Previous FRA reports are available at http://www.fra.europa.eu/
