Schengen Surveillance

ABSTRACT: In 1985, at a meeting in the village of Schengen, Luxembourg, five neighboring Western European countries—Belgium, France, West Germany, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands—committed to remove border controls. In legal terms, the borders between them would remain. But there would no longer be checks on people and goods traveling across them—and eventually even border infrastructure would be dismantled. The agreement was initially outside the legal framework of what was then the European Community, but it was incorporated into the European Union in 1997. The Schengen area grew to include twenty-nine European countries—including some, like Switzerland, that are not even in the European Union—though some EU member states, like Ireland and the United Kingdom, remained outside the area.