As mentioned by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker in his State of the Union speech in September, Commission First Vice-President Frans Timmermans and European Commissioner for Migration and Home Affairs Dimitris Avramopoulos proposed, on Wednesday 16 November, a system for registering travellers from third countries who benefit from visa exemptions and want to travel in the Schengen area.
Designed on the basis of the American ESTA system, the European Travel and Information System (ETIAS) will require €5 from each traveller, and this authorisation will be valid for five years. Authorisation can be revoked at any time if the situation of the traveller concerned should change and be flagged up by one of the different European police databases.
The principle behind this proposed regulation is to enable European authorities to have more information on people travelling in the Schengen area, particularly as part of the fight against terrorism. This system is aimed at gathering information on these travellers ahead of their arrival in the EU member states, and at checking whether they present risks to EU security, or a risk of illegal migration.
The future system will thus be linked to various existing systems, such as the Schengen Information System, the Visa Information System, the Eurodac, and Europol databases in order to check that the person requesting authorisation to travel is not the subject of an alert. It will be possible to check, for example, that a person has not previously exceeded their authorised stay in the Schengen area and thus abused their visa, a European source states.
ETIAS will also be linked to the future entry/exit system, which must again be approved by the European co-legislators and which will record all comings and goings of third country nationals to the Schengen area by recording their dates of arrival and departure, their personal data, their digital fingerprints and facial recognition images (EUROPE 11526). ETIAS will also ideally have to pick up the infrastructure currently being developed of this entry/exit system.
As well as data on the practical modalities of the trip, information such as the level of education and the current employment situation, ETIAS will collect information on illnesses contracted, such as tropical diseases. Travellers will also have to state whether they have been involved in criminal activities. In total, 27 fields of intelligence will be required from these travellers, the same European source stated, promising that the recent data protection rules will be scrupulously applied and that the list of EU questions "remains the shortest in the world".
These data can be kept for five years – a time period chosen for other European data retention systems such as the European PNR. This has been criticised by Eva Joly MEP (Greens/EFA, France), who said in a press release that this new authorisation system enlarged “still further the already considerable range of data collection and profiling systems, although the advantages of this new system are far from being clear”.
ETIAS "will be applied solely to countries exempt from visas, those with which police and judicial cooperation already works well. What is missing is the assessment and rapid exchange of data on suspects and individuals representing an increased risk. The new system will not resolve this problem", Joly observed.
ETIAS will be implemented by the Eu-LISA Agency in charge of large-scale IT networks. It will cost €212 million to develop and its annual operating cost will be €85 million.
It will take at least three years for ETIAS to see the light of day, provided it is first adopted by the member states and the European Parliament – which will take at least a year. “On the technical level, what we are doing is very complicated”, Timmermans stated. It will also be important, for example, for the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (the new name for Frontex) to reflect on the central structure of ETIAS, then test phases will be required, which will take still more time, the European source said. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)