EU interior ministers meeting in Luxembourg on Thursday agreed to rules that would allow “temporary” border controls within the passport-free Schengen area for up to two years when threats to public safety and surges in illegal immigration are spotted. The council’s draft will now go before the European Parliament for a vote.

Frontex, the EU’s external border agency, has said illegal migration increased by more than a third in 2011 compared to the year before. About a third of those movements took place on the frontier between Greece and Turkey.

“The situation on the Greek-Turkish border shows that we need a very clear action mechanism in the Schengen area,” Johanna Mikl-Leitner, Austria’s interior, was quoted as saying by the French news agency AFP.

But Cecilia Malmström, European home affairs commissioner told the AFP that she was “disappointed by lack of European ambition among member states” and opposed Thursday’s agreement.

A spokesman for Luxembourg’s immigration ministry could not immediately be reached for comment. However the minister, Nicolas Schmit, told Delano last summer that “Schengen is an essential pillar of the European integration process, one of the major achievements of European integration. We have really abolished these borders, which created so much grief and so high an economic cost in Europe.”

A Eurobarometer poll released on June 1 found that 67% of Europeans “think it is important to be able to travel within the EU without internal border controls.”

Last summer, in response to an increase in migration from Arab Spring countries, France temporarily introduced border checks along its frontier with Italy, a move which was criticised by the European Commission.

“Free movement within an area without internal borders is a pillar of the European Union,” Martin Schulz, president of the parliament and a German Social Democrat (photo), told the AP. “The European Parliament will not accept any extra reason for reintroducing border controls without a proper... mechanism to evaluate and monitor whether this is necessary or not.”