The Copenhagen School identifies three important aspects of a securitization process, namely given speech acts by certain actors, which move a topic from the political to the security realm in order to legitimate extraordinary means and an audience accepting this shift (Buzan et al. 1998). In recent years the debate about an emerging ‘Festung Europa’ (Kohnert 2006) increases, especially after the enactment of the Schengen agreement and Dublin II (Nuscheler 2004). In this context a further actor emerges, namely the European Union Border Agency called ‘Frontex’, which controls the borders of the European member states. The practices of Frontext are increasingly criticized because of their lack of transparency and democratic accountability and the fact that they are not controlled or supervised by any central institution (Keller et al. 2011). By preventing refugees to reach European borders, they mainly violate the Geneva Convention for Refugees which grants prosecuted individuals the right to apply for asylum. By being prevented to reach a European border, refugees are hold off to claim their rights. Astonishing is the fact that, even if critique of Frontex is increasingly pronounced by NGOs and scholars in refugee studies, the European populations do neither care nor bother. Therefore the paper argues that the undemocratic operations of Frontex are only accepted by European member states populations, because migration to Europe is framed as a security threat and based on this understanding, Frontex is legitimated as an extraordinary mean by central European actors. The securitization process and the side-effect of this tactic are presented and discussed in the paper.
