The European Court of Justice (ECJ) today in Luxembourg ruled that European Union rules precluded member states from jailing non-EU migrants who illegally crossed a border if they have not already been placed on a re-entry ban.
The ruling, which is unhelpful to EU countries battling with unprecedented wave of migrants’ influx, was handed down in a case involving a Ghanaian woman, Selina Affum. She was caught by French police at the Channel Tunnel while on a bus from Belgium to Britain using someone else’s passport. French police placed her in custody for illegal entry into France, while it asked Belgium to readmit her.
The EU court, ruling on Affum’s appeal against her detention, said that imprisonment was against the EU’s “return directive” or laws on deporting migrants.
“The return directive prevents a national of a non-EU country who has not yet been subject to the return procedure being imprisoned solely because he or she has entered the territory of a Member State illegally across an internal border of the Schengen area,” the court held.
The Schengen passport free zone of 26 European countries has come under immense pressure as the EU faces its biggest migration crisis since World War II. As a result, some Schengen countries have brought back border controls that were dismantled a decade ago.
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