France will not be able to control its border with Spain using drones in order to fight irregular immigration that tries to cross it. You will not be able to do it because the drones see and record everything, not only the Malian emigrant who walks a stony path between the two countries, but also gardens, patios and orchards in private homes. They are too intrusive a means of surveillance in the private life of citizens.
The French Council of State, the administrative body that oversees the activities of the Executive, suspended on Tuesday a decree of the Prefecture (government delegation) of the Atlantic Pyrenees, bordering the Basque Country and Navarra, of June 26 that authorized the use of drones in a space of 22 square kilometers delimited by Hendaye, Urrugne, the Behobia bridge and Biriatou and Ibardin. Although the drones did not cross the Spanish border, they could also observe what was happening there.
The decision of the Council of State invalidates in advance other similar projects that the French Interior Minister, Gérald Darmanin, was considering to use drones in other border areas with Spain, starting with the Eastern Pyrenees, adjacent to the province of Girona, and Alta Garona, which limits to the south with Lleida and Huesca.
These initiatives, together with the closure by Paris in 2020 of 16 small border crossings between the two countries, highlight the obsession of the French authorities with irregular immigration from Spain that crosses the Pyrenees.. It is made up of Moroccans, but those in the greatest hurry to go to France are usually Algerians and sub-Saharan Africans from French-speaking Africa.. The immigration that landed on the Spanish coasts has experienced a slight increase between January and July 15 of this year compared to the same period in 2022. 13,487 people without papers arrived (+1%).
The French Council of State put an end, with its decision on Tuesday, to a legal battle between the Ministry of the Interior, determined to deploy the drones, and lawyers from the Association for the Defense of Foreigners (ADDE) of Pau, the capital of the department, seconded by other NGOs and some residents of the area, who rejected this initiative.
The first assault took place at the beginning of the month before the Administrative Court of Pau, which already invalidated the prefectural decree, but the Interior appealed the ruling to the Council of State. This not only confirmed the order, but also ordered the State to pay 200 euros to each of those who appealed the decree before the Justice.
The Ministry of the Interior argued before the administrative courts that it noted this summer an “increase in the number of illegal border crossings” in that area of the Basque Country and that it did not have enough police officers to monitor it.. The prefect's chief of staff, Vicent Bernard-Lafoucrière, admitted to the Bordeaux newspaper Sud-Ouest that they only had 20 police officers on each shift when they would have needed 35. Hence also the need to use technological means to make up for, according to him, the insufficiency of human resources..
This lack of personnel forced the indefinite closure of the Avenida pedestrian bridge between Irún and Hendaye on July 4.. Half of the 16 high-mountain border crossings that Minister Gérald Darmanin ordered closed in 2020 by placing concrete blocks or earth walls are also still closed.. The main one is that of the port of Bañoles (Girona), where the locals on both sides have demonstrated several times shouting “Esborrem la frontera” (Let's erase the border) and they skip the prohibition even at the risk of being fined..
The ADDE and its president, the lawyer Isabelle Casau, responded to the Interior allegation that the migratory pressure from Spain to France was not on the rise. Rejections at the border rose, in the first half of the year, to 3,481, almost half of those of 2022 (6,154). It is true, however, that the number of foreigners detained during the semester in an irregular situation in the Atlantic Pyrenees, after crossing the border, increased by 66% (817) and returns to Spain by 56% (366)..
Even so and with everything, the Council of State ruled that the Interior did not justify that “its services cannot use, to carry out this mission in that area (…), less invasive means and respectful of private life”. annulled the decree. “It was not, at all, justified, because it is not the only way to monitor the border,” Casau said, satisfied when she learned of the decision.. “There are human means,” he recalled. “There is no massive arrival of immigrants that requires resorting to this type of surveillance,” he concluded..
It is not the first time that the use of drones by the Interior has ended, in France, in the courts, although until now the controversies were not related to immigration. Earlier this month, the Administrative Court of Grenoble described as “serious and illegal the damage” perpetrated against “a fundamental freedom” by using two drones in that city to observe and record a demonstration protesting the murder of the teenager Nahel by the police in Nanterre, on the outskirts of Paris.
In Spain, the Civil Guard also uses drones, since May 2022, on the borders of Ceuta and Melilla with Morocco. Four copies of the Matrice 300 RTK model were acquired at the beginning of last year, for a total of 200,000 euros, through an emergency procedure. They are equipped with long visual range spotlights and infrared sensors. Its deployment has not aroused any controversy on the part of NGOs or individuals whose homes are flown over.