Germany Refuses To End Border Checks

For Irish readers, Schengen can sometimes feel like someone else's EU machinery. Ireland sits outside the passport-free zone because of the Common Travel Area with Britain. But the dispute now unfolding matters well beyond those countries with land borders: it is about whether EU rules still bind the biggest member states when domestic politics turns against them.

The European Commission asked nine countries to begin taking down their internal border checkpoints. Germany's interior minister rejected the request within the same week. The opinions issued by the Commission on June 2 are legally required after 12 months of continuous controls, but they do not force governments to act (EU Law Live, Brussels Signal). The EU's flagship free-movement project is now relying on voluntary compliance. The volunteers are thin on the ground.

The Permanent Exception

The nine states, Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia and Sweden, have all kept border checks in place well beyond Schengen's intended emergency limits. Germany, France and Austria have maintained some form of controls since 2015, renewing the legal justification each time the last one expires: migration, terrorism, cross-border crime.

A 2024 reform of the Schengen Borders Code, the rulebook that governs when internal border checks are allowed, was meant to put a hard limit on this practice. In reality, it stretched the legal maximum from six months to three years, overriding a 2022 EU Court of Justice ruling that had found prolonged controls illegal (European Sting).

The Commission has never launched infringement proceedings, its formal legal route for forcing member states to obey EU law, against any country for overstaying its border controls. Cambridge scholars describe this as systematic "underenforcement" driven by political fear. Taking Germany or France to task over border checks would hand ammunition to those arguing that the EU stops 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, rather than dropped. His two conditions for reconsidering, a "significantly improved" EU external border and proof that the new asylum rules actually work, are broad enough to keep the argument open for years (Tagesschau, Spiegel).

Austria's interior minister Gerhard Karner chose a quieter route, moving checkpoints away from the border itself and into the "Hinterland", with inland mobile patrols that make enforcement less visible without ending it. France issued no public response.

Only the Netherlands signalled a real shift. Asylum minister Bart van den Brink said in May that static border posts would be replaced after September by mobile surveillance carried out by the Royal Marechaussee, the military police, using intelligence profiles instead of blanket stops (Rijksoverheid). That is the closest any state has come to the model the Commission is actually recommending.

The cost is paid in border communities rather than ministerial meeting rooms. A German court in Koblenz ruled in April that controls at the Luxembourg border breached the Schengen code, finding no credible threat justification (Ground News). JEF Luxembourg, the Young European Federalists, says some 223,000 cross-border workers cross that frontier each day, with delays of up to 45 minutes at rush hour (Chronicle.lu). Germany appealed and kept the checkpoints.

The Pact That Isn't Ready

The Commission timed its opinions to land just before the June 12 entry into force of the EU Migration and Asylum Pact, a broad overhaul of asylum processing, border screening and burden-sharing. Its political argument is straightforward: once the Pact's new systems are in place, internal border controls should no longer be needed.

The difficulty is that those systems are barely in place. By early May, only 11 of the 27 member states had functioning connections to the reformed Eurodac biometric database (EUObserver). Eleven states still lacked adequate border screening facilities. Hungary had not even requested the implementation funds allocated to it (ETIAS).

That leaves both sides trapped in an argument neither can close. Dobrindt says internal controls are still needed because the EU's external borders are not secure enough. The Commission says the Pact will fix that problem. But the Pact's operational gaps are exactly what allow the secondary movements Germany cites as its reason for keeping controls. Each side has enough evidence to hold its position, and neither has enough to force the other's retreat.

Poland's position shows how tangled the politics have become. Warsaw demanded stronger Commission action against Berlin at the same ministers' meeting where Dobrindt rejected the request. Yet Poland also 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 left Poland out of its nine opinions and gave no public explanation.

With the Commission unwilling to act, national courts in Koblenz and Munich are beginning to fill the space, ruling controls illegal and doing the enforcement work Brussels has avoided. The question now is whether that slow, uneven judicial pressure forces a political reckoning, or whether Schengen's "temporary" exceptions quietly become part of its permanent design. That depends on a step the Commission has avoided for 11 years: enforcing its own rules.