PURPOSE: to conclude the
Agreement between the European Union and Saint Lucia on the
short-stay visa waiver.
PROPOSED ACT: Council
Decision.
ROLE OF THE EUROPEAN
PARLIAMENT: Council may adopt the act only if Parliament has given
its consent to the act.
BACKGROUND: Regulation
(EU) No 509/2014 of the European Parliament and of the Council
amended Regulation (EC) No 539/2001 listing the third countries
whose nationals must be in possession of visas when crossing the
external borders of the Member States and those whose nationals are
exempt from that requirement.
The Regulation was
adopted on 20 May 2014 and entered into force on 9 June
2014.
In July 2014, the
Commission presented a Recommendation to the Council to authorise
it to start negotiations on visa waiver agreements with each of
the following 17 countries: Dominica, Grenada, Kiribati,
Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Saint Lucia, Saint
Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste,
Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tuvalu, the United Arab Emirates and
Vanuatu. On 9 October 2014, the Council
addressed negotiating directives to the Commission.
The negotiations on the
visa waiver agreement with Saint Lucia and the four other Caribbean
countries were opened on 12 November 2014 in Brussels. The
agreement was initialled by the chief negotiators on 11 December
2014. The Commission considers that the objectives set by the
Council in its negotiating directives were attained and that the
draft visa waiver agreement is acceptable to the Union.
CONTENT: the Commission
proposes that the Council approve the Agreement between the
European Union and Saint Lucia on the short-stay visa
waiver.
The content of the
agreement may be summarised as follows:
Purpose and duration
of stay: the agreement provides for
visa-free travel for the citizens of the European Union and for the
citizens of Saint Lucia when travelling to the territory of the
other Contracting Party for a maximum period of 90 days in any
180-day period. The agreement takes
into account the situation of the Member States that do not yet
apply the Schengen acquis in full. As long as they are not part of
the Schengen area without internal borders, the visa waiver confers
a right for the nationals of Saint Lucia to stay for 90 days in any
180-day on the territory of each of those Member States (Bulgaria,
Croatia, Cyprus and Romania), independently of the period
calculated for the whole Schengen area.
A provision has been
included in the agreement stating that Saint Lucia may suspend or
terminate the agreement only in respect of all the Member States of
the European Union and that the Union may also only suspend or
terminate the agreement in respect of all of its Member
States.
Scope: the visa waiver covers all categories of
persons (ordinary, diplomatic, service/official and special
passport holders) travelling for all kinds of purposes, except
for the purpose of carrying out a paid activity. For this
latter category, each Member State and also Saint Lucia remain free
to impose the visa requirement on the citizens of the other Party
in accordance with the applicable Union or national law.
The Member States and
Saint Lucia reserve the right to refuse entry into and short stay
in their territories if one or more of these conditions are not
met.
Territorial
application: in the case of France
and the Netherlands, the visa waiver would entitle nationals of
Saint Lucia to stay only in those Member States European
territories.
The provisions of the
Agreement do not apply to the United Kingdom and
Ireland.
The Agreement
establishes a Joint Committee for the management of the
Agreement, which shall adopt its rules of procedure.