The restrictions on free movement due to the Covid-19 pandemic in the European Union (EU) were uncoordinated and inconsistent with community recommendations, lacking supervision by the European Commission, concludes the European Court of Auditors (TCE) in a report released on Monday.
In a special report on the protection of the right to free movement of persons during the pandemic, the ECA advances that there was “a lack of coordination between the Member States when applying travel restrictions and a lack of consistency with the guidelines and recommendations of the the European Union”.
At the same time, “the European Commission did little to monitor the obstacles caused by the pandemic […] in the right to free movement of people, given the limited tools available to them”, adds the court, in the information sent to the press.
The conclusions come after the ECA analyzed 150 internal border control notifications that Member States sent to the Commission between March 2020 and June 2021, of which 135 were exclusively due to Covid-19.
“The analysis clearly shows that the notifications did not include sufficient evidence that the controls were indeed a measure of last resort or that they were proportionate and time-limited. In addition, the Commission did not open infringement procedures due to the controls introduced at the borders before the pandemic and which lasted longer”, says the ECA.
And, according to the court, “the Commission also did not obtain all the reports that it should have received within four weeks after the end of internal border controls”, nor did it “request additional information or issue any opinion in this regard”. ”.
“The ECA’s assessment is therefore clear: the European Commission did not adequately monitor whether the reintroduction of internal border controls complied with Schengen law,” it stresses.
Any EU citizen has the right to move and reside freely in the territory of the Member States, and is not yet subject to border controls within the Schengen area (which includes 22 EU countries and four other countries).
However, European regulations provide that, for reasons of public order, security or health, this right is temporarily suspended and, in order to reestablish controls at the internal borders of the Schengen area, the Member States must notify the European Commission, which is responsible for assessing whether the proposed restrictions comply with EU law and do not violate the right to free movement of persons.
This is what the countries and the Commission should have done with Covid-19, when the Member States (who make the decision to enter the country) adopted movement restrictions to try to prevent the spread of the virus.
In this audit, the ECA also concludes that “the difficulties of the Commission were also due to the limitations of the current legal framework to supervise the travel restrictions due to Covid-19”.
“The application of these restrictions is the exclusive competence of the Member States, but the Commission has an obligation to facilitate a coordinated approach to minimize the impact on cross-border travel within the EU. To this end, it provided guidelines, […] but that they were not very practical or feasible,” the organization told reporters.
Source: Observadora
