Ceuta Crisis: Why Spain Can't Be Kicked Out of Schengen — But Pressure on Madrid Is Mounting

Last week, as many as 60,000 people crossed from Morocco into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta in North Africa in a single day — the largest wave of irregular border crossings recorded in EU history within a 24-hour period. Although nearly all of them returned to Morocco in the following days, the incident triggered a sharp reaction from European politicians, including members of the Czech ruling coalition, who suggested cutting off Spain's access to the Schengen Area.

Can a country actually be removed from Schengen?

According to migration law experts consulted on the matter, this is legally impossible. "EU law contains no provision that would allow this," said Daniel Thym, a legal scholar at the University of Konstanz in Germany. Saila Heikkilä (Heinikoski), a legal expert at the University of Turku in Finland, agrees: calls to suspend Spain's Schengen membership, she says, are merely a symbolic political gesture rather than a real legal mechanism.

The Schengen Area brings together 29 states with no internal borders, allowing people to move between them without passport checks. It doesn't fully overlap with EU membership, either — Cyprus and Ireland are outside Schengen, while Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland, though not EU members, are part of it.

What other countries can actually do

The only legitimate tool of pressure is the temporary reintroduction of controls at internal borders with Spain. Italy has already done just that: Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni announced the move on Friday. Under the Schengen Borders Code, such a measure is permitted in cases of serious threat to public order or internal security stemming from systemic shortcomings in the management of the EU's external borders.

Still, experts caution against expecting a wave of such measures — this step is likely to be taken mainly by countries with hardline anti-migration stances. In theory, the European Commission could recommend that member states reinstate border controls, and the Council of the EU could approve this by qualified majority (55% of states and 65% of the population), but no country can be forced to comply with the recommendation. It also remains unclear whether the Ceuta incident meets the formal criteria of "systemic shortcomings" — a question that would ultimately fall to the Court of Justice of the EU to decide.

Ceuta's special status and Morocco's position

Legally, Ceuta is part of the Schengen Area, but in practice it operates under special rules: residents of certain border areas of Morocco can enter without a Schengen visa, yet there is no free movement from Ceuta to mainland Spain — departing travelers face border checks designed to prevent migrants from automatically making their way into the rest of the EU.

Under a 1992 bilateral agreement, Morocco is obliged to take back migrants from third countries who entered Spain via Moroccan territory. Spanish law allows for the immediate deportation of those who cross the physical border fence, but in late June Spain's Supreme Court ruled that immediate deportation of migrants arriving by sea is illegal, since they had not crossed any physical barrier. The court suggested installing barriers in the water instead — something Madrid is now doing around Ceuta.

A sign of a prolonged crisis, not the end of Schengen

Migration policy and border control remain largely within the competence of national governments rather than Brussels, meaning the EU lacks any truly powerful levers to pressure individual member states — only political pressure remains an option.

Experts agree that the situation in Ceuta does not threaten Schengen's existence as such, but it does expose a problem that has lingered since the 2015 migration crisis. "Internal border controls, originally conceived as a temporary measure, have been in place in some areas for more than a decade now," notes Heikkilä. According to her, introducing such controls is easy, but lifting them is politically far more difficult, since doing so is seen as a signal that the problem has been solved. "Schengen is not in the best shape, and incidents like this will only push countries toward further tightening their borders," Thym concludes.

Around Prague, based on reporting by seznamzpravy.cz