The European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties adopted, on Tuesday 31 January, its mandate on the draft regulation on the digitalisation of visa application procedures (see EUROPE 12940/8).
It aims to abolish the ‘visa sticker’ by offering the possibility to submit applications online via a specific EU platform that will automatically determine the country competent to examine the application, especially when the applicant wants to travel to several of these countries.
Adopted by 34 votes to 5 with 20 abstentions, the report, together with another vote authorising the entry into negotiations with the EU Council (57 votes in favour, 1 against and 2 abstentions), contains some amendments.
“To ensure that as many people as possible can access the digital visa system, MEPs want to see increased language options and guarantees for people with disabilities and those who are not digitally literate”, says a statement.
And they want to ensure that visa applications are not refused “because several are registered from the same IP address, which may be the case in areas with poor internet connectivity”.
They also argue that IP addresses should “not be collected or processed as part of the visa application”.
The EU Council has not yet adopted its mandate.
According to a note from the Swedish Presidency of the EU Council on 11 January, Member States still need to resolve three main issues, with some countries insisting on the need to keep a physical visa sticker as a safeguard. The definition of the competent country must also be settled.
In particular, this buffer system should be maintained if the Visa Information System (VIS) experiences problems of a technical nature, for example if the national VIS-system is not operational. “Some Member States have expressed the need to be able to issue a visa in urgent cases, even during these periods of unavailability”.
The Presidency had therefore suggested that the possibility of issuing the paper visa sticker without an operational VIS system should be limited to those borders where it may be necessary to issue a visa.
On the designation of the competent authority for the visa application for several countries, “some Member States suggested to keep in the proposal the ‘purpose of stay’ as a criterion for determining the Member State competent to process the visa application, whereas it had been deleted”.
Sweden had suggested several solutions, such as “including in the algorithm that determines the competent Member State a hierarchy between the reasons for residence to be established on the basis of a predefined weight multiplied by the number of days requested”.
The third open point concerns the UK and the requirement for an airport transit visa, with several Member States wanting the country to be exempted.
Link to the report and note: https://aeur.eu/f/553 ; https://aeur.eu/f/557 (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)