April 18th - Delays to Europe's Entry/Exit System continue
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 18 April 2023
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
British travellers and other “third country nationals” entering the EU will not be required to have their fingerprints and facial biometrics taken until 2024 at the earliest.
Europe’s much-delayed entry/exit system (EES) was expected to take effect in 2021. It is currently due to commence in November 2023. But I understand that the electronic border scheme will not now go ahead this year because the database on which it depends will not be ready in time.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. |
| 0:06.5 | It's Tuesday the 18th of April and I'm just finishing off my very good breakfast |
| 0:11.7 | at the Coffee Brothers Hotel in Dortmund, Germany. |
| 0:17.2 | I've had a very nice flight over here when I got to Frontier Control, the very nice |
| 0:23.6 | frontier policeman stamped my passport. By November, that was supposed to have stopped November |
| 0:31.2 | this year. But word reaches me, as they say, that that's not going to happen. Let me explain. There is something |
| 0:40.2 | called the entry-exit system, and that is a system of biometric checks, fingerprints and facial |
| 0:48.5 | biometrics, with which the European Union and the wider Schengen area, of course that's almost all |
| 0:56.7 | EU countries plus Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Plucky Liechtenstein. So the idea is that |
| 1:05.6 | they have secure borders every time you're at an external Schengen area frontier that might be going from |
| 1:13.0 | Dover to Calais it might be flying from Scotland to Spain it might be driving from Greece to |
| 1:19.1 | Turkey every time you will be checked as a third country national that's what we ask for after |
| 1:27.2 | Brexit and that's what we are getting |
| 1:29.3 | the question is when are we getting it and I understand thanks to some very helpful sources |
| 1:38.3 | that actually it is being delayed until um 2024 at the earliest there are simply no possible way in which the |
| 1:51.1 | database that will be ready and also it appears that the individual countries are not going to be in a position to get it to work either. |
| 2:04.2 | Because, well, for goodness sake, poor old Slovenia, who did some modelling on this, said it's going to take four times longer. |
| 2:12.7 | How are we going to do that? |
| 2:14.3 | And bear in mind that from a UK traveller point of view the crunch is going to be |
| 2:19.4 | when you fly into a Schengen area country as I did this morning and if you're travelling by |
| 2:28.9 | Eurostar train then you are going to be going through that check at London St. Pancras International. |
| 2:37.1 | If you're on a ferry from Dover, it will take place at Dover. |
... |
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