The Netherlands and Norway are the last two countries in the Schengen area to have announced their intention to reintroduce border controls. The Dutch controls, which will start from 9 December, will last six months and were decided within the crackdown against irregular immigration proposed by the government led by Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV), Europe’s ally with Matteo’s League Salvini.
Norway, however, on Monday 11 November decided to extend the controls already in place until 1 December. Oslo’s public security minister, Emilie Mehl, justified the decision mainly because of the “threats to Jewish and Israeli targets”. At the moment there are a total of nine countries that have suspended Schengen: Holland, Norway, Austria, Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, Slovenia and Denmark. But what does it mean to reintroduce border controls, and how and for how long can it be done?
The Schengen area
As the spokesperson of the EU Commission, Anitta Hipper, recalled after the Amsterdam announcement, the reintroduction of internal border controls in the Schengen area must be adopted in an ”exceptional” manner and be ”strictly limited in time”. The Schengen area is the area of free movement of people and goods, which allows us to freely cross borders in Europe without going through customs and to travel on planes and ships by simply boarding with an identity card, without the need for a passport , and without having to undergo document checks by the police.
The Schengen area includes all EU member states – with the exception of Ireland and Cyprus – and also includes Bulgaria and Romania which are part of it only for sea and air borders, but not yet for land ones. In the free transit area there are also Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. San Marino and Vatican City are de facto members, although not officially.
The controls
According to the Schengen Code, Member States have the power to temporarily reintroduce internal border controls in the event of a “serious threat to public order or internal security”, but the reintroduction must be applied as a “measure of last resort”, in ” exceptional situations,” and must “respect the principle of proportionality”.
Netherlands introduces border controls to ‘reduce number of immigrants’
The duration of this temporary reintroduction is limited in time, and depends on the reason invoked by the government establishing it. The controls can concern both land and air and sea borders. For the latter it means, for example, that when we take a flight to a country that has closed its borders, upon landing we must undergo a document check by the border police. For land border controls, it means that there will be many more checkpoints on the roads leading to the country concerned that will carry out random inspections.
The reasons for reintroducing them
There are three cases in which border controls can be reintroduced. The first is to prevent risks linked to “foreseeable events”, and in that case controls can be reintroduced for a maximum period of six months. This is the case of the motivation claimed by the Netherlands, which gave as its motivation “the high level of irregular migration, smuggling of migrants and significant secondary migratory flows”, which have caused “high and cumulative pressure on the migratory system, in particular for the reception of asylum seekers”.
Germany and Italy gave similar reasons, with Berlin stating that there would be “security risks associated with irregular migration which increase the serious threats to public order and security posed by the already tense refugee reception situation”, and Rome who spoke of “the risk of terrorist activities, linked to the turbulence in the Middle East and the possible risk of terrorist infiltration in irregular migratory flows”.
Political motivations
In fact, the motivations are often simply political, with a government wanting to show that it is ready to adopt a hard line on migrants, rather than linked to real threats. It is no coincidence that Germany reintroduced controls after the electoral defeat suffered by the Social Democrats of Chancellor Olaf Scholz in the elections of Saxony and Thuringia, Laender in which there was the advance of the radical right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
Even the decision of the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni seems more like a political move than actually linked to concrete risks. Italy closed its land borders with Slovenia on June 19th, with the six months set to expire on December 20th.
