Europe travel: EU agrees on stricter rules for visiting Schengen area

The European Union member states’ ambassadors have tightened the rules for Europe visits and have agreed on a new rule that lets the EU stop visa-free travel for countries whose citizens don't need a visa to visit the Schengen area.

This law will help the EU deal with situations where visa-free travel is being misused or goes against EU interests.

New grounds to suspend visa-free regime

Under the updated mechanism, the EU will be given the following new grounds to suspend the visa-free regime:

• When a country outside the EU doesn't follow the same visa rules as the EU, and this leads to more people coming to the EU, especially because the country is close to the EU geographically.
• The operation of an investor citizenship scheme, whereby citizenship is granted without any genuine link to the third country concerned, in exchange for pre-determined payments or investments.
• Hybrid threats and deficiencies in document security legislation or procedures

Countries in the EU can stop allowing visa-free travel from a specific country if their relationship with that country suddenly gets much worse, especially concerning things like human rights and basic freedoms.

Meanwhile, the duration of temporary suspension of the visa exemption has been increased from 9 to 12 months and can be extended by another 24 months (instead of 18 months under the current system).
During this suspension phase, the European Commission will engage in a dialogue with the third country in order to take steps to remedy the circumstances that led to the suspension.

If no solution is found to remedy the situation, the EU can decide to permanently revoke the visa-free travel regime.

There are 26 countries that comprise the Schengen area. The European Union counts 23 of the 27 as members. The remaining four nations make up the Non-European Union nations and are particular members of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). These four non-EU nations are Norway, Liechtenstein, Iceland, and Switzerland.

The other 23 nations are Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Denmark, Greece, Belgium, Slovenia, Italy, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Luxemburg, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, France, Sweden, Spain and Croatia.