Eurozone plans to formalize passenger data, improve security The European Commission last week proposed rules governing the use of Advance Passenger Information in a bid to strengthen border security. As commissioner for home affairs Ylva Johansson explained during a press conference, travel in and out of the Schengen zone – the 26 European countries between which passengers are free to …
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So to strengthen border security and give border staff advance information about the airplane boarders expected to arrive at the border, information about boarders travelling within the Schengen border-free zone is going to be transmitted to the border guards who are at the moment not there to check on inter-Schengen flight boarders because it is currently, in fact, a border-free zone??
Sounds like a stealthy partial rollback of Schengen to me
Yeah, but it's all about catching criminals.
You know, the guys who traffic women, drugs and weapons and, in order to do so, have to spend hours in airports buying multiple tickets in cash to try and muddy the waters.
Maybe a quicker way to catch them would be to track who is buying more than one ticket for different destinations on the same day and check on those people.
An honest person is not going to book a flight for Berlin and Rome on the same day in the same timeframe. A top-level marketdrone might need to go to Berlin in the morning and Rome in the afternoon, but that will likely be rare.
@Pascal_Monett
Quote: "...An honest person is not going to book a flight for Berlin and Rome on the same day.."
True. But a criminal with money will have three passports in three different names......you know....three tickets in three names going to Berlin Rome and Madrid. How will this proposed invasion of privacy help find this criminal? ....whose real name is a fourth name??
Of course it won't!! But the people in Cheltenham and Fort Meade will just love the invasion of the privacy of millions (billions?) of honest citizens!
Sounds like a stealthy partial rollback of Schengen to me
There have already been several, not stealthy, partial roll-backs of Schengen - taken as emergency measures and never reversed. But Schengen still soldiers on - and I suspect is too popular and useful to ever kill, even if there will always be exceptions.
My Belgian ID card, for example, wasn't a valid travel document within the Schengen zone because I was a UK citizen, so still required my passport. I never looked into what would happen if I'd been a citizen of a different Schengen country living in Belgium. I supect the same, although in that case I'd have obviously been able to travel on my own country's ID card. I'm guessing that didn't work for the UK because we didn't have any ID card to use.
This sytem is going to cover intra-Schengen flights, but you need to remember that Schengen is supposed to be a border free zone inside, which means that extra empasis is supposed to then be put on guarding the external borders of the zone. So that each country is responsible for every member's border security. That's the excuse that Austria and the Netherlands gave for vetoing Romania's entry into the Schengen scheme last week.
My Belgian ID card, for example, wasn't a valid travel document within the Schengen zone because I was a UK citizen, so still required my passport. I never looked into what would happen if I'd been a citizen of a different Schengen country living in Belgium.
Your Belgian ID card wasn't an ID card, it was a residency card.
If you are an EU citizen travelling within the Schengen area but outside your country of residency, you don't need to bother about the residency card because as an EU citizen you have the right to travel around the EU anyway.
If you're a non-EU citizen travelling within the Schengen area but outside your country of residency, you need both - passport for ID, residency card to show you have residency in a Schengen country and border guards or police should disregard any passport stamps which give the impression you've overstayed, as non-EU citizen residents sometimes get their passports stamped and sometimes don't depending on the policy followed by the EU country (and the border guard). You should still follow the 90/180 day rule when visiting another Schengen country though.
In practice when travelling within Schengen, my experience has always been that there is no passport control either at departure or arrival, all airports in Schengen area physically segregate arrivals/departures from/to Schengen or non-Schengen areas. As a passenger you need to provide a photo ID as proof of who you are, usually a national ID or passport, but a residency permit is permitted if it has a photo. Depending on airline policy perhaps also driving license.
I have never been asked to prove who I was in any Schengen country outside of check-in/boarding (of course possibly helped by being a white male!)
> I have never been asked to prove who I was in any Schengen country outside of check-in/boarding (of course possibly helped by being a white male!)
The only time I've ever been asked for ID was in the middle of the pandemic when we (three middle-aged white guys) got stopped by the Swiss Army and border guards about half a KM in (we'd made a point of staying on the right side of the border). They were unamused that I didn't have proper ID on me, but after a brown guy in an expensive car turned up he decided that my "Halbtax" railway card was actually OK and then got onto be racist...
Quoting the eu press release linked in the article:
Streamlined transmission of API data by air carriers to national authorities through a new router, which will be managed by an EU Agency, eu-LISA. This technical solution is compliant with personal data protection safeguards as it will only transmit and not store any API data.
Yes, makes me wonder how long it will take for that router to send a copy of all data (or at least that matching some filter criteria) to a database to allow tracking of individuals that are potential criminals (i.e. everyone),
"With this proposal, we will make it mandatory to share the Advanced Passenger Information for all flights that go in and out of Schengen but also for intra-Schengen flights that are the same as those that are required for the PNR," explained Johansson.
I definitely don't get the last bit of that - flights that are the same as those that are required for the PNR? Huh?
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