ETIAS Began as a Wider Schengen Security Proposal, Not a Brexit Measure

Long before ETIAS became a fixture of travel headlines, the European Commission set out its first formal proposal for the scheme. As published, the plan made one point clear from the outset: the European Travel Information and Authorisation System was not a response to Brexit. It had been anticipated for several years and was based on the United States' ESTA.

The aim was to identify potential risks linked to visa-exempt visitors before they reached the Schengen area's external border. This article looks at how that early proposal was framed at the time of publication.

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What the proposal set out to do

ETIAS was described as an automated system to identify any risks associated with visa-exempt visitors travelling to the Schengen area. All visa-exempt non-EU nationals planning such a trip would have to apply online, or through a mobile app, before departure.

The stated goal was to flag people who might pose an irregular migration, security or health risk before they arrived at the border, strengthening the external frontier while letting compliant travellers cross smoothly. Applications would be cross-checked against existing databases to see whether a person had a criminal record or had overstayed in the past, and the system would be run by an ETIAS Central Unit under the European Border and Coast Guard Agency.

Scope, cost and the road ahead

In scope, ETIAS would apply to travel from third countries to Schengen member states, including those not yet fully applying the Schengen rules at the time, such as Croatia, Cyprus, Bulgaria and Romania. As published, the proposal noted that UK and Irish nationals — then EU citizens — would not need an ETIAS, while flagging that, post-Brexit, UK travellers could later be treated as third-country nationals.

On cost, the 2016 proposal set a fee of €5 for travellers over 18, with the authorisation valid for multiple entries over five years or until the travel document expired. The fee was meant to make the system self-funding against an estimated development cost of €212 million and annual running costs of €85 million. The application was expected to take no more than ten minutes, could be submitted by a third party, and would in most cases be approved automatically by email within minutes. The proposal was then to pass to the European Parliament and Council, with the Commission hopeful that ETIAS could be operational by 2020 or 2021. For how the system works today, see this ETIAS overview.

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