"My whole life was in that police file: my relatives, my calls to my mother, even false details about my sexual life. They wanted to portray me as promiscuous, a lesbian, using morality to make me look suspicious," said Helena Maleno, a prominent Spanish human rights defender, whose work informing authorities when migrants are in distress at sea as they are trying to reach Europe has put her under the spotlight of law enforcement.

When summoned to testify in court in Tangier, Morocco, in 2017, facing accusations of human smuggling and facilitation of irregular migration, Maleno was stunned to hear the judge refer directly to details about her from three Frontex reports in her file.

These reports followed a complex and surprising path: They were part of the file that the Spanish police transferred – without due process – to Moroccan authorities after a Spanish prosecutor dismissed a distinct case on Maleno, finding nothing criminal about her activities. The reports were originally handed over to the Spanish authorities by Europol, the European Union's police co-operation agency, which itself collected them from Frontex, the EU's border agency. They were drafted by Frontex officers after interviewing migrants who had arrived by boat to Spain in 2015 and 2016.

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