Germany Keeps Border Checks Despite EU

The European Commission has asked nine countries to start taking down internal border controls. Germany said no in the same week. The opinions issued by the Commission on June 2 are required after twelve months of continuous checks, but they do not force governments to act (EU Law Live, Brussels Signal). Schengen, the EU's flagship free-movement area, is now relying on voluntary discipline. The main volunteers are absent.

The Permanent Exception

Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, and Sweden have all kept border checks far beyond Schengen's emergency logic. Germany, France, and Austria have had some form of control in place since 2015, renewing them with fresh reasons each time: migration, terrorism, cross-border crime.

The 2024 reform of the Schengen Borders Code, the rulebook on when internal border checks are allowed, was meant to set a firmer limit. It did the opposite in practice. The legal maximum moved from six months to three years, cutting across a 2022 EU Court of Justice ruling that had found prolonged controls unlawful (European Sting).

The Commission has never opened infringement proceedings, its formal route for forcing a member state to comply with EU law, against any country for overstaying border controls. Cambridge scholars describe this as systematic "underenforcement" driven by political fear. Taking Germany or France to task would give nationalist parties an easy line: Brussels is stopping 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. The controls would be "flexibly developed", he said, not removed. His two conditions for reconsidering them were a "significantly improved" EU external border and evidence that the new asylum rules work. Both are elastic tests, which makes them politically useful (Tagesschau, Spiegel).

Austria's interior minister Gerhard Karner chose a quieter route, moving checks from the border itself into the "Hinterland", with inland mobile patrols that lower visibility while keeping enforcement alive. France said nothing publicly.

Only the Netherlands signalled a real change. Asylum minister Bart van den Brink said in May that static posts would be replaced after September by mobile surveillance by the Royal Marechaussee, the military police, using intelligence profiles rather than blanket stops (Rijksoverheid). That is the closest any state has come to what the Commission is asking for.

The burden lands first on border communities. A German court in Koblenz ruled in April that checks at the Luxembourg border breached the Schengen code, finding no credible threat justification (Ground News). JEF Luxembourg, the Young European Federalists, says around 223,000 cross-border workers use that frontier every 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 for the June 12 entry into force of the EU Migration and Asylum Pact, a broad overhaul of asylum processing, border screening, and responsibility-sharing. Its political argument is simple: once the Pact is operating, internal border controls should no longer be needed.

The problem is that much of that system is still on paper. By early May, only 11 of 27 member states had working connections to the reformed Eurodac biometric database (EUObserver). Eleven states still lacked adequate border screening facilities. Hungary has not even requested the implementation money allocated to it (ETIAS).

That leaves a deadlock with no clean exit. Dobrindt says internal controls are needed because the external border is not secure enough. The Commission says the Pact will make them unnecessary. But the gaps in the Pact are exactly what allow the secondary movements Germany cites as justification. Both sides can point to facts. Neither can force the other to move.

Poland shows how tangled the politics have become. Warsaw demanded tougher Commission action against Berlin at the same ministers' meeting where Dobrindt rejected the request. Poland itself keeps 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 the nine opinions, without a public explanation.

With Brussels unwilling to use infringement proceedings, national courts in Koblenz and Munich are doing part of the enforcement work. They can rule individual controls illegal, but they cannot rebuild Schengen's political discipline. That still depends on a step the Commission has avoided for eleven years: enforcing its own rules against the countries powerful enough to ignore them.