Germany rejects EU demand to scrap border checks

The European Commission asked nine countries to start dismantling their internal border checkpoints. Germany's interior minister rejected the request the same week. The opinions the Commission issued on June 2 are legally required after twelve months of continuous controls, but they bind no one (EU Law Live, Brussels Signal). The EU's flagship freedom-of-movement zone now runs on voluntary compliance, and the volunteers are not showing up.

The Permanent Exception

The nine states, Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, and Sweden, have all maintained border checks well beyond Schengen's intended emergency limits. Germany, France, and Austria have kept some form of controls running since 2015, cycling through fresh justifications (migration, terrorism, cross-border crime) each time a notification expires. A 2024 reform of the Schengen Borders Code (the rulebook governing when internal checks are allowed) was supposed to impose a hard ceiling. In practice, it extended the legal maximum from six months to three years, overriding a 2022 EU Court of Justice ruling that had declared prolonged controls illegal (European Sting).

The Commission has never once launched infringement proceedings (its formal tool for forcing member states to obey EU law) against any country for overstaying its border controls. Scholars at Cambridge describe this as systematic "underenforcement" driven by political fear. Punishing Germany or France for border checks would feed the narrative that Brussels prevents countries from protecting themselves (Euronews).

Three Styles of Defiance

Germany's interior minister Alexander Dobrindt set the tone at the EU interior ministers' meeting in Luxembourg on June 4. Controls would be "flexibly developed," he said, not dropped. His two conditions for reconsidering, a "significantly improved" EU external border and proof that the new asylum rules actually work, are deliberately unmeasurable (Tagesschau, Spiegel). Austria's interior minister Gerhard Karner took a quieter path, shifting checkpoints from the border itself into the "Hinterland," inland mobile patrols that reduce visibility without ending enforcement. France issued no public response at all.

Only the Netherlands signalled a genuine shift. Asylum minister Bart van den Brink announced in May that static border posts would give way after September to mobile surveillance by the Royal Marechaussee (military police), based on intelligence profiles rather than blanket stops (Rijksoverheid). The Dutch approach is the closest any state has come to what the Commission actually recommends.

The costs fall on border communities. A German court in Koblenz ruled in April that controls at the Luxembourg border violated the Schengen code, finding no credible threat justification (Ground News). According to JEF Luxembourg (Young European Federalists), some 223,000 cross-border workers cross that frontier daily, facing delays of up to 45 minutes during rush hour (Chronicle.lu). Germany appealed the ruling and kept the checkpoints.

The Pact That Isn't Ready

The Commission timed its opinions to coincide with the June 12 entry into force of the EU Migration and Asylum Pact (a sweeping overhaul of asylum processing, border screening, and burden-sharing). Politically, the Commission argues the Pact's new infrastructure makes internal controls unnecessary. But that infrastructure barely exists. Only 11 of 27 member states had functioning connections to the reformed Eurodac biometric database as of early May (EUObserver). Eleven states still lacked adequate border screening facilities. Hungary has not even requested its allocated implementation funds (ETIAS).

This creates a standoff neither side can win. Dobrindt argues internal controls remain necessary because external borders are not secure enough. The Commission argues the Pact will fix that. But the Pact's operational gaps preserve precisely the secondary migration flows that Germany cites as justification. Both sides are technically right, and neither can prove the other wrong. So the controls continue.

Poland's position captures the absurdity. Warsaw demanded the Commission take stronger action against Berlin at the same ministers' meeting where Dobrindt rejected the request. Poland itself maintains Schengen controls on its German and Lithuanian borders and has suspended the right to claim asylum at the Belarusian frontier seven times. The Commission excluded Poland from its nine opinions without public explanation.

With the Commission refusing to act, national courts in Koblenz and Munich are filling the gap, ruling controls illegal and doing the work Brussels will not. Whether that piecemeal judicial pressure eventually forces a political reckoning, or whether Schengen's "temporary" exceptions simply become its permanent architecture, depends on a step the Commission has avoided for eleven years: actually enforcing its own rules.