Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) has notified the EU Commission of stationary controls for the borders with Poland, the Czech Republic and Switzerland. As your ministry announced, the federal police’s temporary checks directly on the border with Austria, which have been in place since autumn 2015, are to be extended by a further six months.
Faeser justified her decision by limiting irregular migration. It is also about “fighting smuggling crime even more strongly”. According to the Federal Ministry of the Interior, the Federal Police detected around 98,000 unauthorized entries into Germany from the beginning of January to the beginning of October.
“The Federal Police can now flexibly deploy the entire package of stationary and mobile border police measures, depending on the current situation,” said Faeser. It is particularly important to her “that the controls have as little impact as possible on the everyday life of commuters, on trade and on travel.”
Smugglers should be stopped better
Faeser had recently announced increased controls near the eastern border and represented the legal opinion that the federal police could selectively stop vehicles directly at the border – for example if there was a suspicion of smuggling there. She rejected demands from the CDU interior ministers of Saxony and Brandenburg, Armin Schuster and Michael Stübgen, with the argument, among other things, that anyone who requests asylum at the border generally cannot be rejected anyway.
However, smugglers are easier to catch with stationary checks, because during checks across the border they have often already disappeared by the time the police pick up the people who have entered the country irregularly.
Rejections at Schengen internal borders are only legally permissible if the temporary reintroduction of border controls has previously been notified to the EU Commission. However, rejections are only used in relatively few cases, for example if a foreigner is banned from entering the country or if he does not apply for asylum.
France already uses selective controls
Although the principle of open internal borders actually applies in the Schengen area, several states have currently notified border controls. France, for example, has requested controls at its borders with Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Italy, Spain and Switzerland, citing terror risks and irregular migration via the central Mediterranean route and the so-called Balkan route. However, the French do not check everywhere around the clock, but rather selectively and according to the situation. Things will probably be similar in the future on Germany’s border with the Czech Republic, Poland and Switzerland.
Between the beginning of January and the end of September, 233,744 people in Germany applied for asylum for the first time, around 73 percent more than in the same period last year. Many municipalities see themselves at the limit when it comes to accommodation, care and integration of refugees – also because more than a million war refugees from Ukraine have come to Germany since the Russian war of aggression began in February 2022.
