PURPOSE: to conclude the
Agreement between the European Union and the United Arab Emirates 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 the United Arab Emirates (UAE) were opened on 5
November 2014 in Brussels. The agreement was initialled by the
chief negotiators on 20 November 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 andthe United Arab
Emirates 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 the United Arab Emirates 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 the United Arab Emirates 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 the United Arab Emirates 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 the United Arab
Emirates 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 the United Arab Emirates 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 the
United Arab Emirates 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.