Slovenia swaps border checks for biometric tracking

Slovenia stopped policing its borders with Croatia and Hungary in June. Ljubljana is not abandoning enforcement. It is shifting it from the checkpoint to the database, building a biometric tracking system that records who entered, where, and when. Every country along the corridor is recalculating.

What a fingerprint changes

The Slovenian government said temporary controls on its borders with Croatia and Hungary would not be renewed. Ljubljana's justification: the EU's Migration and Asylum Pact (the bloc's overhauled rulebook for screening, asylum processing and returns) started applying on 12 June, and its biometric registration requirements made internal checks redundant (GOV.SI).

Days later, a parliamentary committee approved legislation implementing the expanded Eurodac Regulation (Tax-Fin-Lex / STA). Eurodac is the EU's centralised fingerprint database. The expansion covers more people: not just asylum applicants but irregular entrants and those found staying without papers. It also gives police wider access to cross-border matches (European Commission). Slovenian police now have authority to collect and transmit biometric data to the EU-wide system.

In practice, when someone is fingerprinted in Slovenia, any prior entry recorded in another country becomes visible. Under the Dublin Regulation (the EU's rules for deciding which country handles an asylum claim), the country of first entry typically bears responsibility. For Croatia, the external Schengen border state on Slovenia's southern side, that means more readmission requests landing in Zagreb.

The neighbours aren't buying it

Schengen (Europe's passport-free zone of 29 countries) is supposed to work without internal border checks. The Schengen Borders Code allows temporary controls only when a government can show a serious threat to public order. In June, the European Commission issued formal opinions (non-binding assessments that carry political weight but no enforcement power) on controls maintained by nine member states, urging them to scale back (EU Law Live, Brussels Signal). Legal analysis found recurring problems: late notifications, weak justifications, and no explanation for why less intrusive measures were tried (Verfassungsblog).

The Commission can criticise. It cannot compel. Austria extended its controls at the Slovenian border until September 2026 (Trans.INFO). Italy extended its land-border checks with Slovenia until December.

Germany sets the pattern. Berlin has maintained controls at all land borders since September 2024. German courts have ruled individual pushbacks illegal, finding that asylum seekers should have been processed under Dublin rules rather than turned away on the spot (rbb24, ZEIT). The broad control regime persists. If Europe's largest Schengen state can keep border checks running while Brussels objects and does nothing, every smaller government has a precedent.

Registration without removal

Better biometric tracking makes it harder to file multiple asylum claims or dispute identity across borders. But Eurodac identifies people already in the system. It does not produce a receiving country, a travel document, or a lawful removal route.

The European Parliament approved a new Returns Regulation in June by 418 votes to 218, introducing return hubs (centres outside the EU where rejected applicants could be sent) and stricter cooperation duties for countries of origin (European Parliament). No third country has signed a hub agreement. According to Index, citing Eurostat data, only around 29 percent of EU return decisions were carried out.

Croatia feels the squeeze most directly. Stronger Slovenian registration makes it easier to trace first entry, pushing readmission cases back toward Zagreb. Croatian officials say new screening centres are under construction, but reporting from Brod-Posavina County shows police arresting five suspected smugglers in three days, with courts already strained by translation, detention and custody demands (Večernji list).

The corridor now works like this: Croatia screens at the external border. Slovenia fingerprints. Austria and Italy keep their own controls running anyway. Each government claims to protect Schengen. The question is whether Croatia ends up holding the files, the detainees and the court backlogs that no one farther up the chain wants to process.