Assistance in border area surveillance

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A / SK : State border on the March near Stillfried , Lower Austria (2006)
A / H : Border guards' house, used in assistance operations, dating back to the early days of the Iron Curtain, Neckenmarkt , Burgenland (2012)

As an assistance mission for border surveillance (short: AssE GRÜ; colloquial: AssE, assistance mission, at the border) an assistance mission of the Austrian Armed Forces for the Ministry of the Interior at the Austrian external borders with Slovakia and Hungary was designated. After the fall of the Iron Curtain on September 4, 1990, it was originally set up by a Council of Ministers resolution for only ten weeks and has been continuously extended since then. The border surveillance assistance mission ended on December 15, 2011.

Monitoring areas

With the first decision, the state border with Hungary between Deutsch Jahrndorf and Lockenhaus was monitored by the armed forces. Shortly afterwards, the monitored area was extended as far as the Danube to the north, which also affected border sections towards what was then Czechoslovakia .

With an instruction dated October 25, 1991, the monitored area to the south, starting with Lockenhaus up to the border triangle Austria-Hungary-Slovenia, was set up with its own south monitoring section .

It was not until 1999 that the area was expanded further north along the March towards what is now Slovakia . Thus the length of the border monitored by the armed forces was more than 450 km.

procedure

Following a rotating system, most of the units from all Austrian federal states were sent to the Austrian Schengen external borders for "border surveillance " (short: GRÜ ) . The Burgenland military command issued a personalized stamp "17 years AssE / GRÜ".

After the Schengen Agreement came into force in the Czech Republic , Slovakia and Hungary on December 21, 2007 , a new " security police assistance deployment after Schengen expansion" (SihPol AssE / SchE) , decided by the Council of Ministers, came into force on that day.

The admissibility of border security by the Austrian Armed Forces with these security police tasks is legally controversial, since according to Article 22 of the Schengen Borders Code, crossing the internal Schengen borders is permissible at any point without personal control regardless of the nationality of the person concerned. The provincial governors of Burgenland, and recently of Lower Austria, spoke out in favor of this legally ineffective type of border security. Border controls were also temporarily reintroduced as part of the 2008 European Football Championship .

With the Schengen expansion, border surveillance was relocated from the state border to the hinterland. On December 15, 2011, the assistance assignment ended.

Due to the refugee crisis in Europe in 2015 , units of the Federal Armed Forces have been deployed again at the state border since September 16, 2015.

literature

  • Alfred Lang: Safe borders. From the iron curtain to the armed forces' assistance . In: Traude Horvath (ed.), Eva Müllner (ed.): Hard on the border. Burgenland and West Hungary . Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, Vienna 1992, ISBN 3-85115-165-8 , pp. 141–152.
  • Rainer Maria Kratochwill: The armed forces assistance in Burgenland and the regional effects . Dissertation. Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna 1996.
  • Guide to assistance . BMLV / Office for Defense Policy (Ed.), Vienna 2001.
  • Andreas Steiger: "We are glad that you are here!". The armed forces' assistance for border area surveillance from 1990 to 2004 . In: Wolfgang Etschmann , Hubert Speckner (ed.): For the protection of the Republic of Austria (= writings on the history of the Austrian Armed Forces , special volume). Gra & Wis, Vienna 2005, ISBN 3-902455-03-9 , p. 609 ff.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Controversial in past years . In: orf.at , December 12, 2011, accessed on September 25, 2012.
  2. ↑ Start assistance and border controls. ORF Österreichischer Rundfunk , September 16, 2015, accessed on September 16, 2015 .

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