The €5 billion EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF) is not concentrating enough on priorities to tackle the root causes of instability, irregular migration, and displacement on the African continent, according to a new report published by the European Court of Auditors (ECA).
The fund was established by the European Commission in 2015 at the height of the migration crisis, with an initial funding of €1.8 billion. To date the Trust Fund has received more than €5 billion in contributions and paid out more than €4.5 billion in support across 27 countries in three African regions: the Sahel and Lake Chad (SLC), the Horn of Africa (HoA), and North Africa (NoA).
In fact, this is ECA’s second audit report of the Trust Fund. In 2018, ECA found that while the Trust Fund was a flexible tool, its design should have been more focused. In its new audit, ECA found little change in terms of strategic focus. The Trust Fund continued to address a too wide range of development, humanitarian and security actions, not all of which were the most urgent.
In particular, the auditors found that human rights risks had not been comprehensively addressed by the Commission and that there are weaknesses in the accuracy and sustainability of the reported results. As The Trust Fund is nearing its completion in 2025, the auditors hope that the findings and recommendations may improve its final stage and that of future development actions.
“Scattered support without a strategic focus does not ensure impact,” said Bettina Jakobsen, the ECA Member in charge of the audit and a former Assistant General of the Danish National Audit Office. “Although the EUTF helped to keep migration high on the development and political agenda, we must reiterate our criticism as we found little change in the fund’s focus, which remains too broad.”
The audit covered the period from the EUTF’s establishment until December 2023. The auditors chose at least one country in each region (Ethiopia for HoA, The Gambia and Mauritania for SLC, Libya and Tunisia for NoA) for on-the-spot visits and sampled 16 projects. In addition, they gathered evidence through a confidential survey sent to 176 staff working in EU delegations implementing the EUTF.
The EUTF projects reported many results, and partially achieved their goals. All the projects examined by the auditors also responded to needs, albeit not the most urgent ones. Although the Fund’s rules allowed financing decisions to be taken quickly, too little account was taken of lessons learned, and the EUTF’s achievements were often overstated.
A major finding in the report is that the funding was allocated disproportionately to a wide range of development, humanitarian and security actions.
The allocation of funding was not based on migration-specific indicators such as the number of irregular migrants arriving in the EU, the number of internally displaced persons or the size of the hosted migrant population. ‘Stabilisation’, which accounted for 50 % of the funding to the SLC and HoA regions, is also funded through other EU instruments and is not a specific EUTF priority.
Human rights concerns
In particular, the auditors are critical against the Commission’s monitoring of human rights violations in the countries receiving EU funding.
They found no clear or documented examples, nor practical guidance, on what actions may trigger an EU decision to suspend an activity because of such abuses. Although the programme officers in the survey had reported several allegations of human rights violations, the Commission, at headquarter level, had a record of only one allegation.
Almost three quarters of respondents said they had not received any guidance on how to forward allegations of human rights violations. The report mentions potential human rights risks associated with multiple EUTF activities in Libya.
Asked about the report on Thursday (26 September), a Commission spokesperson explained the monitoring system in place, including third-party monitoring in Libya, and stressed that the Commission does not channel funding directly to the authorities but to UN agencies, international organisations and Member States.
The spokesperson was not immediately aware of any cases where funding has been suspended because of human rights allegations. “While we found clear indications that one of these situations had occurred, the Commission has so far not suspended any EUTF activities in Libya, considering that support must continue to preserve life and alleviate migrants’ suffering,” the audit report says.
ECA and the Commission agree on that EUTF projects are run in challenging environments in which aid may be diverted for unintended purposes. The spokesperson admitted that there are detention centers in Libya run by militia or migration traffickers. “We are trying to work with the Libyan authorities and are constantly pushing them to prosecute any possible abuses in the detention centers,” she said.
Lighthouse Reports, an investigative consortium, claimed in a report in May that the EU supports, finances and is involved in clandestine operations in North African countries to dump tens of thousands of Black people in the desert or remote areas each year to prevent them from coming to Europe,
ECA is not the only EU watchdog which is looking into this. In April, the European Ombudsman decided to continue her inquiry into the respect for human rights in the EU-Tunisia Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). The Ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly, opened an inquiry in September last year but the Commission was late in providing replies to her questions.
The Ombudsman has by now received the Commission's response and is conducting an analysis. “We expect to publish our findings within the next couple of weeks,” a spokesperson of the Ombudsman told The Brussels Times.
In mid-March, the EU signed a Joint Declaration for a Strategic and Comprehensive Partnership with Egypt, upgrading its association agreement from 2004, in March last year. This agreement was also signed amid human rights concerns. The same questions asked by Ombudsman about the EU - Tunisia MoU can also be asked about the Partnership agreement with Egypt.
ECA makes several recommendations, and asks the Commission to address them quickly in order to improve the fund’s final stage and for future development funding with similar aims. In particular, the EU executive should increase evidence-based targeting of geographical areas and recipients, as well as identify human rights risks better and take mitigating action.
In its reply, the Commission welcomed the overall conclusions in the audit and accepted all recommendations.
M. Apelblat
The Brussels Times
