15 December 2020
The Council of the EU and the European Parliament have reached a provisional agreement on new rules for the Visa Information System (VIS), which contains information on all applicants for short-stay Schengen visas. Under the new rules, the system will be extended to include certain data on long-stay visas, more data will be held on short-stay visa applicants (including by lowering the fingerprinting age from 12 to 6 years of age) and the system will be made 'interoperable' with other EU databases. New checks will be performed on visa applicants by cross-referencing their data with those databases, and the system will also make use of a profiling tool to assess the potential 'risk' posed by visa applicants. "Technical" discussions are ongoing to finalise the text.
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Sources:
For more information on the new plans for processing visa applications, see two Statewatch reports from earlier this year:
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