|Published on: 14th May 2026|Categories: News|
- A group of NGOs and legal academics have filed a complaint with the European Commission against Austria over its unilateral suspension of family reunification for refugees.
- A court in Bavaria has ruled that repeated extensions of border controls at the Germany-Austria border are unlawful.
- The Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights has written to the Polish government to express his concerns about the application of the legislation that provides for the temporary suspension of access to asylum at the Poland-Belarus border.
A group of NGOs and legal academics have filed a complaint with the European Commission (EC) against Austria over its unilateral suspension of family reunification for refugees. According to the complainants, including ECRE member organisations the Association for Legal Intervention (SIP), Asylkoordination Österreich, Diakonie in Österreich and the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) Europe, the July 2025 law, which empowers a government minister to trigger the suspension of family reunification for refugees for six months at a time in all but the most urgent of cases, constituted a clear contravention of Austria’s obligations under the EU Family Reunification Directive. They have called on the EC to acknowledge that Austria has violated its obligations under the EU Treaty and to take concrete enforcement action against it, including by launching formal infringement proceedings. Commenting on the complaint on 27 April, David Öberg from IRAP said: “This attempt by Austria to evade its obligations to refugees under EU law is not only devastating for the affected families, who are facing prolonged separation from their loved ones. It also represents a direct challenge to the most basic principles of the rule of law”. “Safeguarding universal respect by all EU member states for the rule of law is more crucial now than ever,” he added.
A court in Bavaria has ruled that repeated extensions of border controls at the Germany-Austria border are unlawful. On 9 April, the Bavarian Higher Administrative Court (VGH) ruled that four identity checks that were carried out on a German citizen in 2022 and 2023 at the border were unlawful as the Federal Ministry of the Interior’s order to extend border controls for the periods from November 2021 to May 2022 and from November 2022 to May 2023 was not justified in accordance with the provisions of the Schengen Borders Code and the case law of the Court of Justice of the EU. The ruling, which was not immediately binding, followed a 2025 ruling by the same court in which an Austrian citizen successfully challenged a Federal Police check carried out in June 2022. Separately, on 27 April, the Administrative Court of Koblenz ruled that an identity check carried out on a German citizen at the Germany-Luxembourg border in 2025 had also violated the Schengen Border Code.
The Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights has written to the Polish government to express his concerns about the application of the legislation that provides for the temporary suspension of access to asylum at the Poland-Belarus border. In a letter addressed to Minister of the Interior Marcin Kierwiński and dated 1 April, Michael O’Flaherty highlights “reports that the Polish authorities apply the legislation to the effect that access to asylum is suspended in every case in which border guards consider that the person has crossed the Poland-Belarus border irregularly” possibly including people who had “moved to, or attempted to move to another EU member state, such as Germany, and were then returned or refused at Poland’s border”. He highlighted “information about the recent removal of a group of Afghan nationals from Poland to Afghanistan, who were not provided with an opportunity to lodge asylum applications” some of whom “were not stopped at the Poland-Belarus border but expressed their wish to apply for asylum elsewhere in the country”. O’Flaherty reminded the Polish authorities about the European Convention on Human Rights requirement for states to undertake a “rigorous and individualised assessment of the risks faced by each person prior to removal” and asked them to provide information about the measures that they were taking to ensure ECHR compliance in migration management.
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