In a ruling handed down on Wednesday 21 June (Case C-9/16), the European Court of Justice (ECJ) says that identity checks carried out near borders, and on trains and at stations, with a view to preventing illegal entry into a member state, are possible when national regulations specify and limit these checks so that they cannot be considered equivalent to border checks.
In April 2014, a person by the name of A was stopped for an identity check when he had just crossed the Pont de l'Europe from Strasbourg, in France, to Kehl in Germany. After he tried to avoid this check, he was prosecuted with criminal proceedings for resisting a law enforcement officer.
When asked by the German jurisdiction, the ECJ said that the removal of checks on internal Schengen borders does not affect the exercise of a member state's police competence on condition that the exercise of this competence does not have equivalent effect to that of border checks.
However, the ECJ notes that the checks in the case of Person A were authorised independently of Person A's behaviour, were not operated separately from the regular checks of people carried out at the EU's external borders, and that they were carried out near a border (within a 30km radius of the land border) without any specification or limit being provided for.
The ECJ is of the opinion that it is the responsibility of the German police to check that the national law provides for a proper framework that makes it possible to determine the intensity, frequency and selectivity of checks.
This reasoning is valid for identity checks carried out on trains and at stations in order to prevent illegal entry onto territory. (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)