The European Commission (EC) has announced the start of consultations with the European Parliament and the Council of the EU in order to improve the mechanism for suspension of visa-free regimes of third countries with the European Union. A message about this appeared on the EC website the day before.
In particular, it says: “The European Commission has adopted a Communication on monitoring visa-free travel. It aims to review the current functioning of the EU visa-free regime and identify the main challenges in the areas of illegal migration and security.”
The European Commission also noted, that the visa-free regime currently brings many benefits to the EU and third countries, both cultural, social and economic. However, as practice has shown, at the same time, a visa-free regime can increase the risks of the spread of organized crime and money laundering.
To minimize such risks, the EC proposes to introduce stronger monitoring of the implementation of the visa-free regime with third countries and to simplify the procedure for suspending the visa-free regime.
The mechanism for suspension of the visa-free regime is set out in Article 8 of the Visa Regulations. Its main purpose is to provide a temporary suspension of the visa-free regime in the event of a sudden and significant increase in illegal migration or EU security risks.
A future revision of the rules may include, in particular:
- new grounds for suspension of visa-free travel, taking into account new risks;
- adaptation of threshold values for launching the visa-free suspension mechanism;
- changing the suspension procedure to be more efficient and flexible;
- strengthening provisions for monitoring and reporting.
The results of the consultations in the European Commission were promised to present in the end of 2023.
Currently, the EU has a valid visa-free regime with 61 countries. Of these, 25 have visa waiver agreements with the EU, and another 8 countries have received visa waivers as a result of the successful implementation of the visa liberalization dialogue with the EU. Among them and Ukraine is.
Last December, the EU announced, that Ukraine was complying with the conditions of visa liberalization, but noted, that more efforts should be made to fight corruption.
