Five EU States Harden Asylum Borders

From Finland's frontier with Russia to the Baltic borders with Belarus, and across to Germany's Schengen checkpoints, five EU governments are now limiting who can ask for asylum at the border. Poland's Sejm, its parliament, has voted to extend border asylum restrictions for another 60 days, renewing measures first introduced in 2025 (RMF24, VisaHQ News). Warsaw says the Belarus route is part of a hybrid operation by Minsk, not a normal migration route. Lithuania, Latvia and Finland have built similar systems on their eastern borders. Germany is applying land-border controls, with powers to reject asylum claims, from inside Schengen.

The legal route is different in each country. The political logic is increasingly the same. No EU institution has publicly said whether these regimes, taken together, still sit within European law.

The Eastern Frontier

The Baltic states show how an emergency response can become the normal way a border is run.

Lithuania treats border enforcement as a form of self-defence against a Belarusian hybrid attack. Its border officers turned back 888 irregular migrants in 2026 up to early July, and more than 25,000 since the crisis began in 2021, according to LRT. A continuing state-level emergency gives border agencies wider powers to refuse entry without the standard asylum process.

Latvia has moved even further towards routine administration. It has extended reinforced border measures until the end of 2026 and allocated an extra €1.7 million to keep them in place (1188.lv). In 2025, Latvia stopped 12,046 crossing attempts while admitting 31 people on humanitarian grounds (BB.lv). The framework sits in border-security law, not asylum procedure. That matters: the system starts from stopping crossings, not hearing claims.

Finland has built more safeguards than its Baltic neighbours. Its temporary border law allows authorities to turn people away at the Russian border when the government decides a hostile state is using migration as a weapon. The law is time-limited and includes exceptions for children, disabled people and anyone facing torture or death (Finlex, Eduskunta). Amnesty Finland still argues the law breaches international obligations because refusal, rather than examination, becomes the starting point (Amnesty Finland).

Germany Checks the Same Border from the Other Side

The same security-first approach has now moved from the EU's external frontier into its internal borders. Berlin has controlled all land borders since September 2024. Since May 2025, those controls have allowed German authorities to reject people who claim asylum at the border. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt says the measures prevented more than 32,000 illegal entries (Deutschlandfunk, DW).

German courts have not accepted the policy without challenge. The Munich Administrative Court found several controls unlawful in 2025, ruling that checks which become effectively permanent cannot be treated as temporary Schengen exceptions. Schengen is the system that normally allows people to cross internal EU borders without passport controls (Tagesschau). Poland introduced controls on the same frontier from July 2025 (Auswärtiges Amt). The result is awkward but revealing: two EU states are checking the same border from opposite sides because neither trusts ordinary Schengen movement to manage the risk.

Who Watches the Exception?

The EU's 2024 Migration and Asylum Pact gave member states a formal legal basis to limit asylum access when a hostile actor uses migration as a weapon. Brussels calls this "instrumentalisation" (Regulation (EU) 2024/1359). But the Pact was meant to allow temporary and conditional departures from the normal rules, not to give governments a standing licence to close asylum access. EU law still requires states to let people lodge protection claims at the border and to assess them individually (Directive 2013/32/EU). The EU's Court of Justice has already ruled against Hungary for making asylum access practically impossible (CJEU C-808/18).

For Malta, this is not a distant northern and eastern European problem. Once emergency border powers become normal practice in one part of the Union, they reshape what other governments think they can do, including small coastal states under migration pressure in the Mediterranean.

The missing evidence is what separates a lawful crisis measure from pushback by another name: how many people affected by Poland's restrictions asked for asylum, how many received individual assessments, and how many were admitted under vulnerability exceptions. Five member states are now building their own answers to the same legal question. The European Commission cannot keep treating them as isolated national exceptions when, in practice, they are becoming a regional border model.