On Monday 13 June European Court of Auditors criticised the European Commission’s action during the Covid-19 pandemic and found that it had not sufficiently monitored the way Member States re-established internal border controls.
“With few tools at its disposal, the European Commission has not paid sufficient attention to the challenges that the Covid-19 pandemic has posed to people’s right to freedom of movement”, the Court wrote in a report published the same day.
“The supervision of internal border controls reintroduced by Member States since March 2020 has not fully preserved the Schengen rules that facilitate free movement within the EU. The auditors furthermore draw attention to the lack of coordination of travel restrictions imposed by Member States and inconsistencies with EU guidelines and recommendations”.
According to the Commission, 14 Member States reintroduced internal border measures in 2020 on the basis of the pandemic threat. However, although the Commission monitored the restrictions on free movement imposed by Member States, the limitations of the legal framework have made its supervisory role more difficult, the Court writes.
Furthermore, the Commission did not carry out proper checks to ensure that internal border controls were in line with Schengen legislation.
However, the notifications of internal border controls sent by Member States were “not accompanied by sufficient evidence that the controls were a measure of last resort and that they were proportionate and time limited”. Nor did Member States always notify the Commission of new border controls - such as Slovenia in summer 2020 or spring 2021, which checked quarantine obligations or PCR test results - or provide the Commission with the mandatory ex-post reports assessing, inter alia, the effectiveness and proportionality of the checks implemented at internal borders. “The reports submitted to it did not contain sufficient information on these important aspects”, the report says.
The auditors examined the 150 notifications on internal border controls that Member States sent to the Commission between March 2020 and June 2021, 135 of which were exclusively related to Covid-19.
The Court of Auditors hopes to use these conclusions to influence the ongoing reform of the Schengen Borders Code, which was the subject of an initial political agreement between EU interior ministers on 10 June (see EUROPE 12969/1).
Link to the report: https://aeur.eu/f/232 (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)