The top EU court has prohibited bus companies from checking passenger passports on cross-border buses, making it difficult for German police to identify illegal immigrants entering the country, say local media.
The ruling by the European Court of Justice could prevent the German police from stopping thousands of illegal border crossings and embolden the migrant traffickers. Last year, the police caught around 14,000 illegal immigrants trying to enter the country by bus and train.
“Germany’s federal police reportedly caught thousands of migrants trying to enter the country illegally on buses or trains in 2018,” German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported. “European Court of Justice ruled that Germany’s membership of the Schengen area prohibits bus companies from checking passenger identity papers.” The existing German regulation required the bus carriers to check passports and residence permits of their passengers before crossing the border.
Germany’s right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party accused the EU court of siding with the migrant traffickers. “The ruling by the European Court of Justice will make the task of the officers impossible. Apparently, there is no interest in controlling immigration,” the AfD party said in its statement. “It is an absurdity to thwart the police work just because some bus companies are committed to convenience or perhaps to people trafficking. The asylum industry is delighted.”
The German newspaper Rheinische Post reported the EU court’s ruling:
According to the German federal police’s record reviewed by our editorial staff, 7943 individuals were arrested in trains and additional 6066 were caught in long-distance buses. However, screening the buses could become difficult in the future following the legal ruling of the European Court of Justice [forwarded to] the German Federal Federal Administrative Court stating that Schengen rules prohibit the carriers in question from carrying out passport checks in long-distance buses.Two bus carriers from German and Spain had brought the lawsuit challenging the regulation directing them to check the passports and residence permit of the non-EU residents before crossing the German border. As the European Court of Justice now ruled, these checks are prohibited. [Translation by the author]
The EU court’s ruling will now be reviewed by Germany’s Federal Administrative Court, one of the five supreme courts of the country, media reports say.
The EU court’s decision once again shows the downside of abdicating national sovereignty to an unelected EU bureaucracy. Despite Chancellor Angela Merkel’s endorsement of the open door immigration policy, German border police and law enforcement agencies are doing an exceptional job stopping illegal immigration and stemming migrant crime.
In the wake of the ongoing mass-migration, Germany not only faces a surge in violent street crimes but also well-organized foreign criminal gangs. Earlier this month, the police carried out a series of raids against Arab gangs across the country. Described by the media as the biggest raid of its kind, the police in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia raided around 100 locations — including Arab hookah joints, gambling halls, betting shops and discos.
“There were 572 investigations in the area of organized crime, involving 8317 suspects. [Out of this group] the German nationals make up for only a relative minority of 29 percent,” the newspaper Leipziger Volkszeitung reported earlier this month. The German nationality of the criminal doesn’t rule out his Arab or Turkish ethnicity, which constitutes the lion’s share in organized crime gangs in Germany.
With the EU elite and German political class committed to ‘building bridges not walls,’ the German law enforcement agencies face the impossible task of getting a grip on migrant crime in the wake of unregulated mass-migration.
Italy’s Salvini: ‘Merkel has underestimated the challenges of migration’:
[Cover image via YouTube]
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