European rules on consular protection allowed 600 000 people stranded abroad to return home during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a European Commission report published on Friday 2 September.
Similar consular assistance was provided to EU citizens and their families following the crisis in Afghanistan and the outbreak of war in Ukraine.
These rules, which allow Europeans to seek protection abroad from the representation of any Member State if their own country does not have an office, could however be improved.
For example, not all Member States have yet fully transposed the 2015 Directive on the coordination and cooperation measures to facilitate consular protection for unrepresented EU citizens in third countries.
While the Directive assumes that unrepresented EU citizens can always turn to another Member State when seeking consular protection, there are many countries where no Member State has an “embassy or consulate established there”.
Furthermore, “in those countries where only few Member States are present, the pressure on those Member States’ consular networks may be high, particularly in crisis situations. In particular, there are 25 third countries where no Member State has an in-country embassy or consular post” and sometimes “the EU Delegation is the only EU diplomatic presence”.
There is also a need for “streamlining measures in order to further facilitate the provision of consular protection”, as well as a need to improve the “exchange of information” between Member States and the coordination of communications, and to clarify the situation of “vulnerable groups”, such as “pregnant women, unaccompanied minors” or “persons with disabilities”, the report says.
The role of the 130 EU delegations abroad could also be strengthened to enable them to interact more directly with EU citizens.
Link to the document: https://aeur.eu/f/2ws (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)