Freedom to travel for Schengen migrants on long-stay visas

The current situation has led to thousands of complaints, says the European Parliament rapporteur Carlos Coelho.




The Grahnlaw blog post Schengen residents with long-stay visa: Proposals on freedom to travel (3 February 2010) mentioned the travel restrictions on legally residing migrants with a national long-stay visa. We also mentioned the Regulations proposed by the European Commission in COM(2009) 90 final and COM(2009) 91 final to enable these expats with “D visas” to travel inside the Schengen area.


The proposals have now advanced in the European Parliament to the stage where the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) is set to adopt its report today, based on the draft prepared by Carlos Coelho (rapporteur):



Draft report PE430.461 on the proposal for a regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council amending the Convention Implementing the Schengen Agreement and Regulation (EC) No 562/2006 as regards movement of persons with a long-stay visa (COM(2009)0091 – C6 0076/2009 – 2009/0028(COD))



The other draft report is PE430.459 on the proposal for a Council regulation amending the Convention Implementing the Schengen Agreement as regards long stay visa and alerts in the Schengen Information System (COM(2009)0090 – C6 0107/2009 – 2009/0025(CNS)).

Here the procedure will probably change from consultation to the ordinary legislative procedure, due to the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty.


Concerning both proposals the rapporteur noted the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, as well as the “omnibus Communication” being prepared with regard to the new legal bases. He also expressed uncertainty whether the national Parliaments have yet to be consulted and granted an 8 weeks period to react on the files which are pending at the moment when the Treaty of Lisbon comes into force.


We may be somewhat wiser with regard to the possible amendments and the procedures after the LIBE meeting today.

Anyway, improvements seem to be on their way for legal migrants on long-stay visas.




Ralf Grahn






P.S. Cross-border communication about European issues is important for our future, and Euroblogs offer an enjoyable way to improve our language skills.

Eva Peña in Barcelona writes expertly and critically about the challenges of the European Union and the EU politics of Spain on Eva en Europa (in Spanish).

Perhaps inspired by the Spanish presidency of the Council of the European Union, bloggers in Spain can now be found on a new aggregator Europeando.eu, with posts in Spanish, Catalan and Galician.

Eva en Europa is listed among 522 great Euroblogs (at the latest count) on growing multilingual Bloggingportal.eu, your useful one-stop-shop for fact, opinion and gossip on European affairs: politics, more than thirty policy areas, communication, economics, finance, business, civil society and law.

If you are interested in the EU or the euroblogosphere, you can also subscribe to the RSS feed for new blog posts appearing on Bloggingportal.eu.

By the way, I also discuss European issues in Finnish on Eurooppaoikeus and in Swedish on Grahnblawg.

EFTA member Switzerland outside EEA and EU

The relationship between Switzerland and the European Union is of interest to governments, businesses and residents, including expats.


Yesterday, in the Grahnlaw blog post Internal market: Switzerland at the heart of Europe? we highlighted the briefing paper commissioned by the European Parliament on the complex relationship between the European Union and Switzerland with regard to the internal market:



Christa Tobler, Jeroen Hardenbol & Balázs Mellár: Internal Market beyond the EU: EEA and Switzerland (PE 429.993; January 2010; 65 pages).

In this blog post we present references to some basic materials on Switzerland’s relations with the rest of Europe.



Switzerland is a member of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), together with Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway. However, unlike the three others, Switzerland is not a part of the European Economic Area (EEA).



For a fairly updated general presentation of EFTA, see This is EFTA 2009 (January 2009; 36 pages).



The latest annual update is the 48th Annual Report of the European Free Trade Association 2008 (March 2009; 52 pages).



In English and with further links, the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs SECO offers general information about EFTA, the European Policy of Switzerland and Bilateral Agreements Switzerland – European Union.



Through the web page Bilateral agreements Switzerland-EU you can access a brochure from August 2009 with further information: Bilateral agreements Switzerland-EU (44 pages)



There is also a page with links to Other files Switzerland-EU.




For a more political Swiss view on why Switzerland remains outside both the European Union (EU) and the European Economic Area (EEA), you can read the article by Werner Wüthrich: The Future Belongs to Lean Organizations like EFTA (Current Concerns No 1, January 2010).




Ralf Grahn







P.S. Sooner or later, I believe, the European Union has to become more openly and directly party political in order to be understood and approved by EU citizens.

Heralding this future of active citizens are the bilingual mirror blogs by a French PES activist: Eurosocialist in English and Eurosocialiste in French. Her motto is: A socialist view on Europe, a European view on socialism.

Eurosocialist/Eurosocialiste are listed among 522 great Euroblogs (at the latest count) on growing multilingual Bloggingportal.eu, your useful one-stop-shop for fact, opinion and gossip on European affairs, i.a. politics, more than thirty policy areas, communication, economics, finance, business, civil society and law.

At the same time Euroblogs are an agreeable way to brush up one’s skills in foreign languages.

If you are interested in the EU or the euroblogosphere, you can also subscribe to the RSS feed for new blog posts appearing on Bloggingportal.eu.

By the way, I also discuss European issues in Finnish on Eurooppaoikeus and in Swedish on Grahnblawg.

Schengen residents with long-stay visa: Proposals on freedom to travel

There is a problem concerning circulation within the Schengen area without internal borders for third-country nationals legally residing in one of the Schengen states on the basis of a long-stay "D" visa issued by that member state:

Lacking a residence permit, D visa holders are not allowed to travel to the other member states during their stay; nor are they allowed to transit through the other states when returning to their country of origin, as this is not provided for by the Schengen Convention.


Due to the different legal bases and procedures, the European Commission made two parallel proposals in order to remedy the problem:





Proposal for a COUNCIL REGULATION amending the Convention Implementing the Schengen Agreement as regards long stay visa and alerts in the Schengen Information System; Brussels, 27.2.2009 COM(2009) 90 final (11 pages)




Proposal for a REGULATION OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of […] amending the Convention Implementing the Schengen Agreement and Regulation (EC) No 562/2006 as regards movement of persons with a long-stay visa; Brussels, 27.2.2009 COM(2009) 91 final (11 pages)


The aim of the proposals is to extend the principle of equivalence between a residence permit and short-stay visas to long-stay D visas; hence a long-stay visa would have the same effects as a residence permit as regards circulation in the Schengen area.



Visa Code


Meanwhile, the Visa Code, Regulation 810/2009 has been approved:




REGULATION (EC) No 810/2009 OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 13 July 2009 establishing a Community Code on Visas (Visa Code); published in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) 15.9.2009 L 243/1

Article 1
Objective and scope

1. This Regulation establishes the procedures and conditions for issuing visas for transit through or intended stays in the territory of the Member States not exceeding three months in any six-month period.

2. The provisions of this Regulation shall apply to any third-country national who must be in possession of a visa when crossing the external borders of the Member States pursuant to Council Regulation (EC) No 539/2001 of 15 March 2001 listing the third countries whose nationals must be in possession of visas when crossing the external borders and those whose nationals are exempt from that requirement, without prejudice to:

(a) the rights of free movement enjoyed by third-country nationals who are family members of citizens of the Union;

(b) the equivalent rights enjoyed by third-country nationals and their family members, who, under agreements between the Community and its Member States, on the one hand, and these third countries, on the other, enjoy rights of free movement equivalent to those of Union citizens and members of their families.

3. This Regulation also lists the third countries whose nationals are required to hold an airport transit visa by way of exception from the principle of free transit laid down in Annex 9 to the Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation, and establishes the procedures and conditions for issuing visas for the purpose of transit through the international transit areas of Member States’ airports.

Regulation 810/2009, the Visa Code will apply from 5 April 2010.



Lisbon Treaty


The Treaty of Lisbon entered into force on 1 December 2009, so both proposals will probably be adopted under the ordinary legislative procedure.


***


We will return to look at the progress of the proposals to ease the travel restrictions on residents with long-stay visas.




Ralf Grahn







P.S. Sooner or later, I believe, the European Union has to become more openly and directly party political in order to become understood and approved by EU citizens.

Heralding this future of active citizens are the bilingual mirror blogs by a French PES activist: Eurosocialist in English and Eurosocialiste in French. Her motto is: A socialist view on Europe, a European view on socialism.

Eurosocialist/Eurosocialiste are listed among 522 great Euroblogs (at the latest count) on growing multilingual Bloggingportal.eu, your useful one-stop-shop for fact, opinion and gossip on European affairs, i.a. politics, more than thirty policy areas, communication, economics, finance, business, civil society and law.

At the same time Euroblogs are an agreeable way to brush up one’s skills in foreign languages.

If you are interested in the EU or the euroblogosphere, you can also subscribe to the RSS feed for new blog posts appearing on Bloggingportal.eu.

By the way, I also discuss European issues in Finnish on Eurooppaoikeus and in Swedish on Grahnblawg.