With the growing importance of agencies in the EU executive space in terms of competences and resources (i.e., agencification), advocacy groups have started to direct their lobbying efforts towards EU agencies. In particular, civil society organisations that advocate for human rights are currently represented in a number of consultative bodies and platforms of EU agencies such as the Fundamental Rights Agency, the European Asylum Support Office, and Frontex. The role of these bodies and platforms is to assist EU agencies in gathering information on fundamental rights issues. However, access to EU agencies gives human rights groups a privileged position to push their claims forward.
Frontex – i.e., the EU external borders management agency–is peculiar among EU agencies for its quasi-operative competences, and growing resources. Moreover, since its inception, Frontex has raised serious concerns on fundamental rights abuses and lack of accountability with regard to the respect of human rights. As a consequence, in 2011, the revised Frontex Regulation introduced a Fundamental Rights Strategy, and two new bodies: the Fundamental Rights Officer and the Consultative Forum on fundamental rights (CF). Aim of this paper is to establish how advocacy groups lobby Frontex from within (i.e., in the CF) and what is the effect of this lobbying activity on the agency. These two issues are addressed in this article, first by determining the factors and the rationale for advocacy groups access, by cataloguing the groups represented in the Consultative Forum according to their resources and policy goods. Secondly, semi-structured interviews have been conducted to establish what strategies are employed by advocacy groups within the Consultative Forum. Lastly, the efforts of these advocacy groups will be matched with the evolution of Frontex’s approach to human rights, and studied through frame analysis, in order to assess the outcomes of their lobbying activity on Frontex.
