“The Schengen area is sliced up like Swiss cheese,” said Slovenian Socialist MEP Matjaž Nemec, a member of the European Parliament’s Schengen borders scrutiny group. “As long as the Commission turns a blind eye to blatant violations of EU law and allows large countries like Germany and France to get away with them with impunity, the future of the EU looks bleak.”
Our investigation found that Germany had issued alerts for Ukrainian refugees once held in Russian-controlled penal institutions, blocking them from entering the European Union. Although Ukrainian authorities said the list of former prisoners had been shared with law-enforcement agency Europol solely for informational purposes, the names later found their way into the EU’s Schengen Information System — a database that links border-control and law-enforcement authorities across the bloc, allowing them to share real-time alerts during police checks and at external border crossings.
Former detainees, rights groups and lawyers say that information-sharing coincided with a surge in entry bans — separating families and leaving former prisoners trapped by opaque security decisions they can’t meaningfully challenge. Last week the European Data Protection Board warned that Germany and other member states were failing to provide sufficient data to assess whether individuals’ rights under the Schengen Information System were being respected.
“The situation of Ukrainians detained by Russia must be improved, as they are the group currently paying the highest price for safeguarding Europe’s security,” said MEP Pekka Toveri, a Finnish member of the center-right European People’s Party. “Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine concretely demonstrates why such continuous assessment is essential. Managing Europe’s external borders is a core part of the credibility of the entire Schengen system, yet Russia’s brutal actions also create exceptional situations that no normal system is designed to handle.”
Dobrint’s barricades
In 2007, when eastern neighbors Poland and the Czech Republic became fully integrated into the Schengen zone, Germany dismantled the last of the checkpoints at which agents asked to see the passports of travelers entering the country by land. Within years, however, Germans began to have second thoughts about the move.
Amid the 2015 refugee crisis, multiple Schengen countries deployed internal border controls under emergency provisions of EU law. Those allow temporary checks as a tool the European Commission describes as a “measure of last resort,” limited to exceptional circumstances and typically applied in a targeted, intelligence-led way.