EU considers reinstating national border controls

Ian Traynor in Brussels guardian.co.uk

Brussels said on Sunday that national passport controls might be reintroduced across Europe to allow the "temporary" re-erection of borders between 25 countries.

Responding to intense pressure from Italy and France to tighten the no-borders system known as the Schengen regime, José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European commission, said he was looking at ways of satisfying the two countries' concerns. Paris and Rome are alarmed at an influx of migrants fleeing revolutionary north Africa.

In a letter to French president Nicolas Sarkozy and Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, Barroso said that the commission would unveil new proposals on Wednesday on immigration policy, common European asylum procedures, and reform of the Schengen system.

The commission's proposals are to go to a summit of EU leaders next month, with France and Italy leading the charge for a partial renationalisation of border controls, a trend the commission would like to resist but looks too weak to counter.

The Franco-Italian push to place greater restrictions on the Schengen regime, launched last week after a furious row between Paris and Rome over refugees from Tunisia, has already won support from a handful of other EU countries, including Germany.

The Schengen system, introduced in 1995 after being agreed a decade earlier, abolished frontier checks between 22 EU countries plus Norway, Iceland and Switzerland, and is viewed by many of the 400 million Europeans concerned as one of the more tangible benefits of the EU. Britain and Ireland are not part of the system, insisting on retaining their national border controls.

Despite pressure from Malta and Italy over some 30,000 refugees, mainly from Tunisia in recent weeks, the commission has rejected calls for a temporary suspension of the Schengen regime.

But in his letter, Barroso conceded that national authorities may be given greater leeway to play with the Schengen rules.

"Strengthening the application of the Schengen rules is an area that the commission is in the process of examining," he said. "The temporary re-establishment of [national] borders is one possibility among others which, subject to specific and well-founded criteria, could constitute one element for strengthening observance of the Schengen agreement."

Member states are allowed to freeze Schengen and mount border controls solely on national security grounds at present, a move that has to be blessed by Brussels.

The commission, though, appears to be moving, reluctantly but under great pressure from national capitals, towards granting governments more scope for closing down the passport-free zone which extends from the Arctic to the Mediterranean and from the Atlantic to the Baltic Sea. Guardian