The first COVID passports are already being checked at the borders of European countries
As the BBC notes, the digital COVID certificate, as it is officially called, will be a single document for all EU countries certifying vaccination, a negative PCR test, or a recent COVID infection confirmed by a positive PCR during the illness.
Its goal is to avoid the chaos of last summer, when each EU country introduced its own rules, which effectively suspended the freedoms of Schengen – the agreement on borderless space in Europe and its vicinity.
“The COVID certificate is a symbol of the revival of Schengen. Our message is to restore Europeans’ confidence and desire to try to live as before, to breathe deeply the air of freedom of movement, which we cherish so much and which we have missed so much,” said Juan Fernando López Aguilar, head of the European Parliament committee, after MEPs overwhelmingly approved the relevant law.
The new document will exempt holders from having to take additional tests and undergo quarantine when traveling between EU countries. Medical professionals in any EU country will be able to place virtual stamps for vaccinations and tests in the internal digital COVID passport. And all other countries of the union will now be obliged to accept it.
Rules and exceptions
It will look like a QR code in a free phone app, but border guards, bouncers and other checkers must accept printed versions as well, despite the name “digital certificate”.
EU officials claim that the personal data of Europeans in this app will be protected like never before, the information transmitted during certification will be reduced to an absolute minimum, and access to all data will soon expire altogether, since the adopted law is limited to one year.
But there are caveats. For example, antibody tests cannot be entered into the pan-European COVID passport. But a vaccination mark is made after any vaccination. However, EU countries are obliged to admit only those citizens of other bloc countries who are vaccinated with one of the vaccines approved in the European Union. There are currently four: Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna and Johnson&Johnson.
But there are exceptions here too. Each country individually is not obliged, but may at its discretion admit EU citizens vaccinated with non-approved vaccines, for example, Chinese or Russian ones. As well as decide whether to admit only after two shots or one is enough.
COVID certificates are not new for the EU: negotiations on them have been ongoing since November last year, and since January the technical parameters of the single documents have been known, which allowed those who wished to start introducing them in June, without waiting for the law to be adopted and come into force on July 1. About a dozen countries are already issuing internal European COVID passports: from Greece and Spain to Germany, Lithuania, Poland and Bulgaria. The EU is pushing the rest with the new law. And money.
The European Parliament, in the process of negotiations with the European Commission (effectively the EU government), failed to achieve free testing for everyone at the expense of the budget. But officials eventually promised to allocate at least 100 million euros to subsidize PCR tests. This is especially important for young people, since almost nowhere in the EU have they yet reached the queue for vaccination. Therefore, a negative test is their only chance to travel around the European Union.
First Schengen, then the whole world
The EU hopes that COVID passports will restore freedom of movement and avoid last year's pile-up of barriers within the union, which had known no borders for decades. They will simplify and unify existing certificates of immunity or absence of infection.
“The COVID certificate will not be a mandatory condition for free movement, since this is a fundamental right of EU citizens,” the European Commission assured. Yet it will not be possible to completely exclude the return of barriers.
The law allows EU countries to close borders to Europeans. However, MEPs and the commission tried to make this loophole as narrow as possible. If anyone wants to use it, the authorities of that country will have to notify their neighbors in the European home 48 hours in advance and describe in detail both the scale of the encroachment on freedom of movement and the exact deadlines or parameters upon reaching which the restrictions will be lifted.
The transition period is set at one and a half months, and just in time for the height of the tourist season in mid-August, internal European COVID certificates should be accepted without reservations in all EU countries. At the same time, the EU will extend their validity to all countries not in the European Union but without hard borders with it thanks to the Schengen Agreement: Switzerland, Norway, Liechtenstein and Iceland. And the next step, the EU hopes to turn internal COVID passports into international ones and convince other states, including the US and the UK, to recognize them.