Today Mr. Fabrice Leggeri was appointed new Frontex
Executive Director during the 51st meeting of Frontex Management Board held at
the Agency’s headquarters.
“Today the supervising board has determined the course for the future of the Agency” – announced the chairman of the Frontex Management Board Ralf Goebel. “Fabrice Leggeri will have the challenging task to steer and further develop Frontex in close cooperation with Member States of the European Union”.
Born in 1968, Mr. Fabrice Leggeri holds a degree and postgraduate diplomas in history and is a graduate from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) and the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA).
He started his career at the French Ministry of the Interior in 1996, heading the Crossborder Traffic, Frontiers and Visas Unit within the Directorate for Civil Liberties and Legal Affairs.
As a national expert detached to the European Commission in 2000-2003, Mr. Leggeri contributed to drafting the Commission Communication COM(2002)233 “Towards an integrated management of the EU external borders”, which was endorsed in 2002 and recommended the creation of Frontex.
Between 2003 and 2007, he represented the State in two French regions holding the office of Vice-Prefect. In 2007, Mr. Leggeri joined the French Ministry of Defence to head the division of International and European Law, a position he left in 2011 when he moved to Seoul to become the deputy head of the French embassy in the Republic of South Korea.
Since August 2013, he has headed the Division on Irregular Migration at the French Ministry of the Interior, with key responsibilities arising from Schengen-related public policies and illegal immigration. He also managed annual budgets of domestic and EU source.
Mr. Leggeri has 18 years of professional experience in key aspects of border and immigration policies at the national and European level. He has been engaged in the political, legal, technological and financial dimensions of border and immigration policies and has a long standing involvement and familiarity with Frontex, its operations, activities and management.
Mr. Leggeri will join Frontex for a five-year term, succeeding the current Executive Director ad interim Gil Arias who took over the post after the resignation of Ilkka Laitinen earlier this year.
”I would like to thank the European Commission and the members of the Frontex Management Board for their trust in my abilities” – said the newly appointed Executive Director. “I am ready to take my post at the beginning of January 2015. I will start my work by listening to Frontex staff and all our partners before I set out strategic priorities for the agency. I also want to visit the external borders of the EU – air, land and sea in order to see for myself the challenges which border guard authorities face there” – he added.