The Interior Ministers of the EU Member States will discuss, on Thursday 9 March during their formal Justice and Home Affairs meeting, the delays in implementing the interoperability of European information systems, particularly at the level of the European agency eu-LISA.
In an information note submitted to the Member States, the Swedish Presidency of the Council of the EU indicates that the Entry/Exit System (EES), the smart border system for monitoring visa holders crossing European borders, will not be able to enter into force as planned in May 2023.
“This involves continued efforts to find possible solutions to deliver the system, but also to explore alternative scenarios, especially in the case of persistent failure by the contractor to deliver (the EES), and further assessment on the best approach for the delivery of different systems. In any case, the entry into operation of the EES, that had repeatedly been rescheduled and now is set for mid-May 2023, needs to be postponed again.”, says this preparatory note dated 1 March.
The revised timeline will have to take into account the significant delays due to the late delivery of the central system by eu-LISA’s external contractor, explains the Presidency.
Furthermore, a delay in the implementation of the EES system has, according to the Presidency, “a knock-on effect on other EU information systems, in particular the European Travel Information and Authorisation System (ETIAS)”, whose entry into operation had been rescheduled for mid-November 2023.
Adopted in 2019, the regulations on the interoperability of information systems aim to link the Schengen Information System, the Visa Information System, the ETIAS travel authorisation system, the Entry/Exit System and the European Criminal Records Information System.
They should allow law enforcement agencies to access the results of these databases more easily and simultaneously by entering a single entry on a suspect via a central portal system.
The European agency eu-LISA is responsible for managing the entire IT architecture of this interoperability, but technical delays have been accumulating ever since.
On Thursday, the Presidency will therefore ask Ministers to respond to the following two questions regarding the implementation of the EES and the potential impact of delays on the interoperability architecture, in particular “whether to start considering alternative scenarios when assessing the timelines for the implementation of the interoperability architecture and of its underlying IT systems”.
Link to the note: https://aeur.eu/f/5no (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)