Macron reinforces controls at the border with Spain and Italy in the face of the terrorist threat

French President Emmanuel Macron on November 5 at the Franco-Spanish border in Le PerthusPOOL / Reuters

France will strengthen border controls with Spain and Italy in response to the recent attacks in France.

French President Emmanuel Macron traveled to one of the migrant entry points into his country on Thursday - Le Perthus, together with the Spanish population of La Jonquera - to announce new anti-terrorist measures.

The number of policemen, gendarmes and soldiers deployed on the borders with European neighbors will go from the current 2,400 to 4,800, double.

Macron argues that Islamist terrorism takes advantage of human trafficking networks to infiltrate Europe.

"The attacks that France has known, that Austria has known a few days ago in Vienna, show us that the terrorist risk is everywhere," Macron said in a statement to the press during a surprise trip to Le Perthus, located in the main communication hub between Spain and France, and the main passage for people and goods.

“Terrorists organize worldwide through networks on the Internet, but also by dispatching agents across borders.

This requires intensifying the response.

France does it on this border ”, he added.

The displacement of the head of state, together with the ministers of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, and of Europe, Clément Beaune, sought to highlight the message of the days after the attacks: France is mobilized.

Mobilized inside, with measures such as the dismantling of Islamist organizations.

And abroad, with a greater presence of the security forces on the internal Schengen borders.

Macron has also proposed what he has called a "re-founding of Schengen", that is to say of the surveillance of the external borders of the European Union.

Spain and France are part of the Schengen area and, in theory, there is no border between the two countries.

However, after the jihadist attacks of November 2015 in Paris, France relied on an article of the European treaty that allows it to carry out border controls for reasons of “national security”.

Since then, and under the premise of capturing terrorists, Paris has established controls to identify people, monitor the transit of immigrants and return to Spain, officially and unofficially, those who do not meet the entry requirements.

The suspension of the free movement of people does not please Madrid and is interpreted as a subterfuge to contain the so-called secondary movements.

The then Foreign Minister, Josep Borrell, today the head of European diplomacy, referred in June 2018 to the return of people outside the official channels in an interview with the German newspaper

: “Let's say that we are moving on the border of the legality".

In just over a month, France has suffered three knife attacks.

At the end of September, a 25-year-old Pakistani injured two people outside the former headquarters of the satirical magazine

in Paris.

On October 16, an 18-year-old Chechen refugee beheaded a history and geography professor on the outskirts of Paris.

And on the 29th of the same month, a 21-year-old Tunisian, who had entered Europe a few weeks earlier via the Italian island of Lampedusa, killed three people in the Notre-Dame basilica in Nice.

"We clearly see how terrorist actions are perpetrated by people who use migratory flows to threaten the national soil," Macron said in Le Perthus in reference to the attack in Nice.

"Due to national security imperatives, we must reinforce controls."

The data on the use of migratory routes and trafficking networks for the entry of terrorists, however, are not conclusive, according to several reports cited by

newspaper

.

A Europol document, published in 2020, notes that "there are no signs of systematic use of irregular immigration by terrorist organizations."

Another report by a group of UN experts, however, cites the arrest, last May in Cyprus, of nine Syrians, an Egyptian and a Turkmen linked to groups in the orbit of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, as proof of "The ability of alleged terrorists to use illegal migration routes to reach Europe."

The Franco-Spanish border is a hot spot for the passage of migrants to the rest of the continent.

Madrid and Paris have had an agreement for the readmission of immigrants in an irregular situation since 2002, through which both countries return people who were denied entry into their territory.

On the basis of this agreement, France returned 1,691 migrants to Spain in 2019, including citizens of Syria, Yemen or Eritrea, according to data obtained by the Transparency portal.

It is the lowest figure since 2016.

One part of the returns is made officially and covered by this bilateral agreement, but another, apparently much more numerous, is carried out unofficially, without paperwork and without even notifying the Spanish authorities.

There is no official record of these returns, but as revealed by EL PAÍS, between January and October 2018 alone, France had expelled 9,038 irregular immigrants to Spain, a figure that far exceeds 2,888 officially recognized returns that year.

The hypothesis of a new exogenous terrorism

The attack in Nice last week has stoked fears in France of a return of so-called exogenous terrorism.

In other words, the attacks perpetrated by people from abroad with the specific mission of attacking in France, a different profile of the French terrorist or the foreigner settled in this country.

Brahim Aouissaoui left the Tunisian city of Sfax in mid-September, landed in Europe on the Italian island of Lampedusa and, after two weeks of quarantine, arrived at the port of Bari in southern Italy.

There, the Italian authorities issued an expulsion decree that gave him a week to leave the territory, but his trail was lost.

Investigators examine his contacts between that time and October 28, when he arrived in Nice to murder two women and a man in the Notre-Dame basilica the next day.

A dozen of these contacts have been detained and interrogated, but none have been charged so far and most are already at large.

Aouissaoui, shot when confronting the police after the attack, is hospitalized and has not yet been able to testify.