PURPOSE: to define the technical amendments necessary to fully set up the European Travel Information and Authorisation System (ETIAS).
PROPOSED ACT: Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council.
ROLE OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT: the European Parliament decides in accordance with the ordinary legislative procedure and on an equal footing with the Council.
BACKGROUND: Regulation (EU) 2018/1240 of the European Parliament and of the Council created the European Travel Information and Authorisation System (ETIAS) for third-country nationals exempt from the requirement to be in possession of a visa when crossing external borders. It laid down the conditions and procedures to issue or refuse a travel authorisation.
ETIAS enables consideration of whether the presence of those third-country nationals in the territory of the Member States would pose a security, illegal immigration or high epidemic risk.
The ETIAS Regulation provides that the personal data contained in the applications will be compared with the data contained in records, files or alerts:
- in alerts recorded in other EU information systems or databases (the ETIAS Central System, the Schengen Information System (SIS), the Visa Information System (VIS), the Entry/Exit System (EES) or Eurodac), and the European Criminal Records Information System for third-country nationals (ECRIS-TCN);
- in Europol data;
- in the Interpol databases (the Interpol Stolen and Lost Travel Document database (SLTD) or the Interpol Travel Documents Associated with Notices database (TDAWN)).
Not all data are collected or recorded in the same way in the other EU information systems and Europol data. For instance, ‘first names of parents of applicants’ are collected by ETIAS, but not in most of the other systems to be queried by ETIAS.
In order to enable the verification referred to in Article 20 of Regulation (EU) 2018/1240, it is necessary to amend the legal acts establishing the European Union's information systems to ensure interoperability with ETIAS. Without this interoperability, ETIAS cannot enter into service.
CONTENT: the proposal defines the technical amendments necessary to fully set up the ETIAS system. It amends the legal acts establishing the EU information systems that are necessary for establishing their relation with ETIAS.
As a result, it is necessary to amend Regulations of the European Parliament and of the Council (EU) 2018/1240, (EC) No 767/2008, (EU) 2017/2226, (EU) 2018/1861 (SIS border) in order to connect the ETIAS Central System to the other EU information systems and to Europol data and to specify the data that will be sent to and from those EU information systems and Europol data.
As compared to the ETIAS Regulation, this proposal only specifies in more details which data is to be compared to which data in the other EU information systems and provides with the necessary amendments as regards granting access rights to those other systems to ETIAS Central and National Units.
This proposal therefore presents amendments to the ETIAS Regulation to specify that the ETIAS Central System would build upon the EES Central System’s hardware and software components in order to establish a shared identity repository for the storage of the identity alphanumeric data of both ETIAS applicants and third-country nationals registered in EES. This shared identity repository would be the basis for the implementation of the common identity repository once the co-legislators adopt the legislative proposals on the interoperability of information systems.
The proposal builds on the Schengen acquis on the crossing of external borders and visas. It therefore takes into account the consequences of the various protocols and agreements signed with the associated countries.