Germany's Bavarian Higher Administrative Court (VGH) in Munich has ruled that repeated extensions of border controls at the German-Austrian border were unlawful because the federal government failed to justify them under EU law. The checks themselves stay in place for now, and the judgment is not yet legally binding.

The case was brought by a German woman living in Vienna. Federal Police stopped her on four occasions in 2022 and 2023 while she traveled between Austria and Germany by train and long-distance bus. The Munich Administrative Court had rejected her claim, but the Higher Administrative Court overturned that decision and ruled in her favor.

What did the court find unlawful?

The judges examined the successive extensions of the controls ordered by Germany's Federal Ministry of the Interior. They concluded that these extensions did not comply with the Schengen Borders Code or with case law of the European Court of Justice.

Under those rules, each six-month extension — covering the periods from November 2021 to May 2022 and from November 2022 to May 2023 — required a new and substantiated justification based on a serious and current threat. The court found that threshold had not been met.

The judges rejected several of the government's core arguments:

• Persistently high levels of secondary migration (people moving on from one country to another, defying the EU's Dublin regulation)
• Strain on Germany's reception capacity for asylum seekers

The court said the official extension orders did not adequately demonstrate a new or specific threat situation, as EU law requires.

The judges added that, under European case law, border controls cannot be justified solely on grounds such as national security, public order or internal security.

Who is affected — and what actually changes now?

For travelers crossing the German-Austrian border, nothing changes immediately. The spot checks by the Federal Police remain in force despite the ruling, because the judgment has no immediate practical effect and is open to appeal.

The ruling does, however, add to legal pressure on the practice. It follows a similar decision by the same court just over a year earlier, when an Austrian traveler successfully challenged a Federal Police check carried out on a train in Bavaria in June 2022.

What is the wider border-check picture?

Germany and Austria have repeatedly tightened border controls in recent years to curb migrant arrivals, typically ahead of politically sensitive periods, as parties compete for voters amid growing anti-migrant sentiment and seek to limit support for the far right.

Germany currently carries out spot checks on most of its borders with neighboring countries. According to the European Commission's page on temporary reintroduction of border control, eight Schengen countries currently have such controls in place: France, Italy, Slovenia, the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

The Commission's framework allows temporary extensions to be renewed every two months, but they should not last more than two years. Germany, which first introduced its Austria border checks in 2015 under emergency provisions, is not currently on the Commission's list.

What happens next?

The federal government may appeal the Munich ruling to Germany's Federal Administrative Court. Until that court rules — or the government accepts the judgment — the legal status of the extensions remains contested while the checks continue on the ground.