As Ursula turns a blind eye, the EU's freedom of movement is unravelling
As predicted, Schengen is under assault following Germany's unilateral decision last year to conduct passport checks at all 9 of its internal EU borders - with Poland now blocking its borders as well.
Last month, the Schengen Area celebrated its 40th anniversary. It started in 1995 with France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands agreeing to dismantle the border control infrastructure that had existed between them for 100 years. They agreed to allow people to cross their borders without having to stop and show a passport - as easily as someone would cross from one US state to another. Over four decades more and more countries have joined, even four non-EU ones (Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Switzerland), and the area now extends across 29 countries encompassing 450 million people, 3.5 million of whom cross these internal borders every day. The process culminated at the same time as the anniversary with Romania and Bulgaria finally able to open their land borders this year, meaning that all EU countries are now in Schengen except Ireland because of its common travel area with the UK and Cyprus because of its unresolved border with the Turkish-administered north of the island.
But there was another less happy development last week that coincided with the anniversary, one that the Commission wasn’t keen to point out in its promotional material for the anniversary. Poland announced that it will block its borders with Germany and Lithuania and start conducting passport checks, using (abusing) the Schengen Code’s provisions allowing emergency temporary six-month exemptions from the Schengen rule banning countries from conducting such checks. For 15 years now, national governments have been abusing this loophole by enacting exemptions using flimsy reasoning for what constitutes an emergency and then renewing the exemptions every six months. The European Commission, under presidents Barroso, Juncker and von der Leyen, has turned a blind eye to this abuse.
That’s the dirty secret that the Commission doesn’t want you to know about as it celebrates the Schengen anniversary. If you go to the Commission website listing the exemptions currently in force, you find that