Italy suspends free movement with Spain: Is Schengen in crisis after Ceuta?
Analysts say Italy’s move to halt border-free travel with Spain after the deadly crossing is political rather than practical. On July 30, days after more
Analysts say Italy’s move to halt border-free travel with Spain after the deadly crossing is political rather than practical. On July 30, days after more than 60,000 people crossed into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta from Morocco, Italy announced it was reintroducing border controls with Spain. Ceuta’s president, Juan Jesus Vivas, told broadcaster Telecinco that between 3,000 and 5,000 migrants remain in the enclave, as the vast majority have returned. At least 72 people died in the crossing. Because Italy and Spain do not share a land border, the measure affects people travelling between the two countries by air and sea. “In Italy, a lot of the media coverage was saying [Italian Prime Minister Giorgia] Meloni is suspending Schengen, or that Spain should be removed from Schengen,” Davide Colombi, a researcher in the Justice and Home Affairs unit at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), told Al Jazeera. “Neither of those options is actually available … you cannot kick a country out of Schengen.” The Schengen Agreement, signed in 1985 and put into force a decade later, abolished passport checks at the internal borders of its 29 member states, creating one of the world’s largest zones of free movement. Colombi explained that suspending Schengen “doesn’t necessarily mean anything”. “One member state cannot suspend Schengen. What it can do is temporarily reintroduce internal border controls,” he said. Such controls are, in fact, a well-worn feature of the passport-free zone. According to the Asylum Information Database (AIDA), run by the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE), at least six member states – Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway and Sweden – have kept some form of internal controls almost continuously since 2015, and nine states maintained them throughout 2025.
Europe’s refugee crisis peaked in 2015, when more than a million people arrived in the European Union. Germany reinstated border controls with Austria after roughly 40,000 arrivals in one weekend; Austria, France, Sweden, Norway and Denmark soon followed. ‘Nothing more than political theatre’ But Italy’s move represents “the first time that a country has unilaterally reinstated Schengen border controls based on a large number of arrivals in a country with which it doesn’t share internal borders,” said Eleonora Testi, ECRE’s senior legal officer. Colombi was more direct about the practical logic. “There is no realistic possibility for anybody from Ceuta to arrive in Italy,” he said. Neither analyst sees the measure as a response to Ceuta itself so much as a template to demonstrate that a member state can invoke Schengen’s emergency provisions over a crisis unfolding in another territory, for reasons that are more political than operational. That reading is echoed by rights groups. “Italy’s reintroduction of border controls with Spain is nothing more than political theatre. It’s a savvy manipulation of EU law to show that the government is ‘tough on migration’, while effectively only causing problems to tourists and other people travelling from Spain to Italy [on a Schengen visa],” said Chiara Catelli, advocacy officer at the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants (PICUM). Within days, 22 EU member states signed a joint letter aligning with Italy’s position. Testi contrasted this with the EU’s treatment of a comparable case, when Poland suspended the right to claim asylum at its border with Belarus in March 2025, in what AIDA described as a clear breach of EU and international law. There was no equivalent show of member-state solidarity – instead, an EU regulation was proposed to help Warsaw manage the crisis.
The BriefWire