Régimen jurídico de la vigilancia fronteriza de la Unión Europea sobre los flujos migratoriosEstudio particular de la Guardia Europea de Fronteras y Costas

Resumo

This study provides a legal analysis of the European Union’s border surveillance activity to help understand the problems arising from the humanitarian and migration crisis, and to put forward solutions to some of them. Specifically, one of the matters it addresses is the impact of secondary movements of migrants on the functioning of the Schengen Area and the apparent incompatibility between each State’s sovereign law in determining who enters its territory and its observance of the human rights of migrants wishing to enter it. In order to achieve the study’s objective, the legal analysis of border surveillance has been organized into four blocks. The first one describes the conceptual scope of border surveillance activity and in doing so explains the peculiarities of the European model of borders, the way competences are shared between the European Union and the Member States, and the concept of the activity of border surveillance based on an analysis of the powers involved in such a concept. The second block gives a detailed study of national implementation of Article 13 of the Schengen Borders Code, using the Spanish and Italian legal systems as a reference, and the distinction between land and sea borders as the criterion for classification. As regards the sea borders, the study pays special attention to the enormous influence of sea rescue operations on the surveillance of such borders. The third block deals with exercising the same Article 13 of the Schengen Borders Code, but this time within the context of operational cooperation among the Member States coordinated by the European Border and Coast Guard Agency. Lastly, given the relevance of the latter agency due to the migration crisis and the gradual reinforcement of said agency’s mandate, the fourth block provides an analysis of the powers conferred upon the European Border and Coast Guard Agency to ensure the effectiveness of the EU’s acquis as regards border control. The legal analysis carried out in this study concludes that there is a trend towards the communitarization of the implementation of the border surveillance mandate contained in Article 13 of the Schengen Borders Code. This trend will end up becoming the norm if the European Union through the European Border and Coast Guard Agency continues to take on powers in this area that whose exercise used to correspond to the Member States.