“To be honest, it looks really promising… After three years of fighting, finally a positive response!” When reached by phone a few hours later, Axel Dris isn’t gloating. He’s just letting out a sigh of relief.
The story, however, begins with something very simple. A cross-border student. A standard school career. A clear plan. Axel Dris lives in Luxembourg, but attended school in Arlon, Belgium, throughout his education. “When I finished secondary school, I had only one thing on my mind: studying medicine.” He sat the entrance exam. He passed it. But he wasn’t admitted. “I’d passed… but I wasn’t within the quota.”
The reason boils down to a bureaucratic technicality: he is not a Belgian resident. The decree limits the number of non-residents admitted. It doesn’t matter what his background is. It doesn’t matter that he completed his entire education in the country. The blow is immediate. The urgent appeal fails. At the start of the new academic year, he changes course. “I had to fall back on law.”
Many would have moved on. Not him. “My parents and I agreed: it was an injustice. And we didn’t want it to happen to anyone else. Especially in Europe… to us, it just wasn’t right.”
25 minutes to convince the judges
From that point on, the story takes a different turn. It is no longer just the story of a student who failed his exams. It is the story of a young man who decides to see his argument through to the end. Right to the very end--literally. Three and a half years of legal proceedings. Appeals. Hearings. Waiting. “It was a really long time… Between the pleadings and the decisions, it’s months, sometimes years. In this case, it’s been three and a half years.”
At first, he surrounded himself with lawyers. Then he distanced himself from them. “We knew the case better than most lawyers.” In December 2024, before the Council of State, he argued part of his case himself. “Honestly… I argued the case better than my lawyer.” That was the turning point. The student became his own defence.
On 14 January, he found himself before the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg. There were about a hundred people in the courtroom. Five judges sat opposite him. And, on the opposing side, his former law professor. “It was incredibly stressful… The Council of State was intimidating enough. But the Court of Justice is in a league of its own.” His closing speech lasted nearly 25 minutes. Too long for the allotted time. He had to speed up--without going too fast, to allow the interpreters to keep up. He knew this was his only chance. “I told myself: I might as well be frank.”
The ‘occasional tourist’ and the manufactured shortage
The text he presents is dense, well-structured and precise. But it is certain phrases that stand out. “The passport takes precedence over the educational background.” Or again: “You don’t spend 12 years at school just to get round a decree.” For in the case file, the government had described him as an “occasional school tourist”. He repeats the phrase before the judges, without mincing his words: “To apply that label to a pupil who has been in education since primary school is to deny reality.”
But behind the rhetoric lies a solid argument. He challenges the very notion that medical schools are at capacity. In 2022, the year he was excluded, fewer than 900 students were admitted, compared with over 1,500 in subsequent years. “That’s not capacity. It’s an artificially maintained shortage.” Over the phone, he explains this point with simplicity. “Actually, the case was already there. It was the same arguments from the start. I just had to put it all together to make a coherent case.” He is not alone in this, however. His mother and his father, a doctor, supported him throughout the process. “They helped me a lot, even though they’re not lawyers at all.”
On 16 April, the Advocate General’s opinion confirmed this line of reasoning. It argues that the residence criterion, when applied rigidly, fails to take account of people’s actual integration journeys. If the Court follows this advice--which it often does--Belgium will have to review its system. But for Axel Dris, the issue lies elsewhere. “What I’m fighting for isn’t just my own case.” In border regions, people’s journeys ignore administrative boundaries. “I’m too Belgian for Luxembourg and too Luxembourgish for Belgium.”
A certain vision of Europe
His struggle highlights a clear flaw in the European Union. A Europe where people move freely, but where certain life stories remain legally invisible. He is now studying for a Master’s degree in European law at the University of Luxembourg. It is ironic that he is now studying the very rules he had to rely on all by himself for three years. “In class, I saw the case law that I’d used myself… and I thought to myself that it made no sense to have had to go to such lengths to assert it.”
The way people look at him has changed. “When it hit the papers, I felt like a star,” he says with a smile. But behind the spotlight, a harsher reality remains: that of a student who stood his ground, alone, against the system. A David versus Goliath situation. The legal proceedings are not over. He will have to go before the Belgian courts again. The fight may drag on. He has no doubts. “It would be really stupid to give up now.”
At 21, he doesn’t yet know whether he’ll become a lawyer or a judge. But he has already learnt one essential thing: the law isn’t just practised in books. And for those who are hesitant to take the plunge, his message is simple: “If you really want to fight, it’s always possible.” In his closing statement, he concluded with these words: “EU law is not intended to divide children from the same school according to which side of the border they sleep on at night.”
A single sentence. And perhaps, for others, a starting point.
