Justify yourself Denmark!

So says the European Commission and European Commissioner for Home Affairs, Cecilia Malmström, in particular. They have been to Denmark and have decided that the new rules governing its borders,

"In a first assessment the experts reported that they were unable to get sufficient justifications from the Danish side for the intensification of the controls at the internal borders."

I am not sure about you but the justification should be, it is what the people of Denmark want. What the Commission is proposing is to beef up its own monitoring of teh beefed up Danish border controls. But they are displaying some straw man arguements while they are at it.

There are persistent concerns about the compatibility of Denmark's strengthened internal control measures with the freedoms provided under the EU Treaty including the Schengen acquis. It is incumbent on Denmark to demonstrate factually that the gravity of the situation justifies putting in place controls which might affect the exercise of free movement of goods, services and persons at the internal borders with Germany and Sweden.

You see though the new Danish controls are indeed there to crack down on mass migration, they have nothing whatsoever with the free movement of goods and services. Everybody is pretty happy about that not least the Danes, but by suggesting that they are holding up goods and services rather than merely people the EU is trying to demonise the Danes into backtracking on what is clearly a popular policy.