Beatrice Tridimas

LONDON - Equipped with its own uniforms and thousands of troops stationed at border crossings and airports in Europe and beyond, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency is the European Union’s biggest and richest agency. 

Better known as Frontex, the force set up to help manage the bloc's communal border also bears the taint of allegations that it is complicit in violent and forceful migrant returns.

The number of people arriving illegally in Europe has fallen in 2025, but experts warn that irregular migration will persist as conflict and economic hardship intensify and migrants forge new pathways to avoid tougher security measures.

Arrivals fell by 20% in the first six months of the year, continuing 2024's downward trend, according to the European Union's border agency Frontex, which credited the drop to increased cooperation with transit countries.  

Despite migration dominating European political debate over the last decade, the number of irregular arrivals to the European Union has remained significantly lower than the peak of 2015, when a million people arrived in the bloc.

Overall, numbers have not come close since, but the main irregular routes to Europe have remained busy, with some seeing similar or even higher activity than 10 years ago. 

The European Union has proposed a "safe countries of origin" list as part of its overhaul of migration legislation, with the aim of speeding up asylum applications that are unlikely to be successful.

Asylum seekers from the seven countries on the list - Colombia, Kosovo, Bangladesh, India, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia - are granted protection in the EU in less than 20% of cases.

At the heart of global efforts to tackle the climate crisis lies a vexing question: how to finance the multimillion-dollar shift from fossil fuels to clean energy.

For poorer countries reliant on coal power to fuel their growth, shuttering high-output power plants often tied into long electricity contracts is difficult and expensive.

A decade ago, the image of a three-year-old Syrian boy washed up dead on a Turkish beach prompted an outpouring of emotion and renewed commitments from European governments to take in refugees fleeing Syria's brutal civil war.

Alan Kurdi drowned alongside his mother and brother when a rubber dinghy headed for Greece sank off the coast of Turkey in September 2015.

A new film, "Ocean," by naturalist David Attenborough features never-before-seen footage of bottom trawling - a fishing practice criticised as destructive and wasteful in which heavy nets are dragged across the seabed.

The film was released ahead of the United Nations Ocean Conference starting on June 9 in Nice, France, where scientists and conservationists warn that governments must accelerate efforts to fulfil their marine protection promises.

After days at sea making the risky crossing from West Africa to the Canary Islands, migrants typically face hours of questioning by Spanish authorities trying to identify - and detain - the drivers of the boats they came on.

But those drivers usually are neither the ringleaders nor profiteers, and they are being wrongfully charged under European Union counter-smuggling rules, non-governmental organisations say.

European lawmakers have proposed changes to the safe third country (STC) concept to make it easier for asylum seekers to be transferred to a country other than the one where they made their application for protection.

The review, part of the EU's overhaul of its immigration rules, proposes scrapping the requirement that an asylum seeker have a connection to a safe third country in order to be sent there.

Underinvestment in staff means Europe's fire services are overstretched as climate change raises the risk of deadly blazes, firefighter unions in the world's fastest warming-region have warned.

Wildfires fuelled by hotter, drier weather and household fires, which unions say are sometimes caused by uncertified installations of solar technology, are straining fire services across the bloc.