On Tuesday 25 January the EU27 Ministers for European Affairs adopted the revised recommendation on non-essential travel to the EU, agreeing both on a duration of validity of the EU Covid certificate of 9 months after the second dose (a duration framed in a delegated act that will enter into force on 1 February) as well as on a change of orientation in the health restrictions, focusing now more on individuals and their vaccination, testing or Covid-19 recovery status rather than on geographical areas.
This change should thus convince Member States to lift restrictive health measures for people with the EU Covid certificate, even though the non-binding recommendation does not oblige them to do so.
The aim is in any case to move towards “limited constraints”, commented the French Secretary of State for European Affairs, Clément Beaune.
By revising the ‘emergency brake’ in the text, the ministers also gave the Commission the possibility of requesting a debate in the EU Council when a threat affects several Member States with proposals for a coordinated response.
With regard to the maps published periodically by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), the ECDC should continue to publish a map of the regions of the Member States indicating the potential risk of infection according to a traffic light system (green, orange, red, dark red). This map will be based on the 14-day case notification rate, vaccine uptake and screening rate.
However, on the basis of this map, Member States should apply measures regarding travel to and from dark red areas, where the virus is circulating at very high levels.
In particular, they should discourage non-essential travel and require that people arriving from these areas without a certificate of vaccination or recovery be tested before departure and quarantined after arrival.
This recommendation does not oblige Member States to lift other measures decided at national level, such as the imposition of tests on fully vaccinated travellers, as Italy is doing, Clément Beaune repeated.
At the national level, Member States also do not all require the same length of validity for health or vaccination passes as a condition of access to certain places and services.
However, the principle of the Recommendation is to convince all Member States to bring their practices closer together.
Asked about these different measures in the EU, the Commission said on Tuesday that it was “fully aware of the gap” and acknowledged that citizens' lives would be “easier if all the rules were aligned”.
The organisation ACI Europe, which brings together European tourism and transport associations, called on the same day for Member States to put an end to this “patchwork”.
Link to the recommendation: https://bit.ly/3fUWQv2 (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)