Prague, May 9 (CTK) – The intensive border checks the Czech Republic imposed due to the migrant crisis in 2015 would fail to pass the Schengen assessment which the EC issues once in five years to verify the observance of cooperation standards by EU states, the Czech Interior Ministry says in its annual report.
Nevertheless, the border checks have discouraged most migrants and prevented the emergence of a migration route across the Czech Republic, the ministry writes in its report on the fulfillment of the national Schengen plan that will be discussed by the cabinet on Wednesday.
“In the context of a mass influx of migrants in the EU and based on the indications of a possible emergence of a migrant route across the country, the Czech Republic started to perform intensive checks along the [Schengen] internal borders without using the official procedures the Schengen border code sets for such cases,” the ministry writes.
It says the situation is mainly due to the absence of any directives to define rules for border checks performance.
The Czech police, in cooperation with the Interior Ministry, will draft the necessary rules by the end of the year, the ministry writes.
All of the Czech Republic’s neighbours are a part of the Schengen area and therefore no Czech border is the EU or Schengen’s external.
The police introduced tighter border checks last June. Since then, the police have been performing random checks on the border with Austria, mainly on the busiest border crossings.
In 2015, the Czech police detained 8,563 foreigners who entered the country illegally, which was a 77-percent year-on-year increase caused by the migrant crisis.
The detained foreigners were most often Syrians (about 25 percent).
The ministry’s annual reports deal with the EU’s internal and external borders and the visa problem. They assess the fulfilment of the National Schengen Plan which the government approved in 2014 as the basic document focusing on Schengen cooperation and border protection.
rtj/dr/kva
