EU Member States must better assess the abuse of short-stay visa suspension regimes and set both qualitative and quantitative criteria. They should also strengthen information campaigns in non-Member States exempted from short-stay visas and rely more on networks of migration liaison officers to better understand the problems.
This is the conclusion reached by the Finnish Presidency of the Council of the EU in a report dated 17 October, in which it referred to the problems raised by several Member States with regard to non-Member State nationals exempt from visas, such as Georgia or Albania, the latter country being one for which the Netherlands has even requested a suspension of visa liberalisation.
In this report discussed within the Visa Working Party (VWP), the Presidency notes that a number of Member States report difficulties with the phenomenon of "overstayers", people who entered the EU without visas for 3 months but who do not leave. In particular, they report abuses linked to medical tourism (a problem recently raised by France regarding Georgians who come to France for treatment); other nationals remain to work illegally and also go off the radar.
"The recent visa liberalisation with Georgia, Albania and Ukraine and its misuse are of particular concern to a number of Member States", the report says. "The number of manifestly unfounded asylum applications, which in many cases appear to be opportunistic following the granting of visa liberalisation, has risen sharply", the Presidency also notes, without giving any figures.
Nationals of "Albania, Georgia, Ukraine and, to some extent, Moldova, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Armenia are among the claimants without grounds for asylum, sometimes in large numbers, according to Member States' data". The number of asylum applications from El Salvador, Colombia and Venezuela has "also increased recently, indicating that asylum applications from Latin America must be carefully monitored", the Presidency writes.
Another concern is "the fact that some of these misuses of visa liberalisation are linked to serious cross-border crime and organised crime", a reason given by the Netherlands in particular with regard to Albania.
Without advocating the automatic suspension of these schemes in the event of abuse, the note insists on the collection of better statistical and qualitative data that should then be exchanged between Member States. According to the Presidency, Member States also consider the deadline for notifying the Commission of problems to be a little too short: they can notify difficulties if, over 2 months, they have observed unusual trends compared to the same period of the previous year, but this two-month period is considered insufficient. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)