By Chris Jones - 3rd October 2006
The EU has criticised the US over its continued refusal to waive the visa requirements for 10 member states, calling it “no longer understandable or acceptable”.
EU justice commissioner Franco Frattini has written to his US counterpart Michael Chertoff in a bid to increase the pressure on Washington to justify its refusal to extend a visa waiver agreement to all 25 member states
EU citizens from nine of the new member states must apply for visas before travelling to the US, despite an agreement with most of the EU15 to waive the visa requirement.
The US says that visas are required from the ten countries – all the new member states with the exception of Slovenia, as well as Greece – on security grounds.
But Brussels claims that the US is “hiding behind the legislative criteria for refusing an extension to the visa waiver programme” and that “political considerations obviously prevail”.
According to a commission spokesman, Frattini’s letter to Chertoff stressed that US concerns about the safety of travellers from these ten countries were “not supportable”, given that they had all complied with the same legislation as the rest of the EU.
He also called on the US to provide a “country-by-country analysis of the criteria considered to be unmet” in order to resolve the issue.
The most widely used criterion for refusing visa waivers is the number of refused applications – which must be less than 3 per cent.
But the commission calls this “at best questionable” since it is the US authorities that control the number of refusals.
“This situation is extremely frustrating for the new member states in particular, as the waiver should also apply to them,” the spokesman said.
Frattini has also urged the countries concerned to do all they can to try to address the security issues highlighted by the US.
The spokesman said that the issue would be raised at the troika meeting on November 6 – which will also include the Finnish EU presidency – but that there was little expectation of a sudden change of heart by Washington.
The US is not the only country criticised by Brussels for failing to remove visa requirements - Australia and Canada are also singled out.
Canberra has recently unveiled plans for a gradual extension of visa waivers to the new member states, and a simplification of its general visa application procedures.
But Canada continues to pursue bilateral agreements with each country – it recently began waiver proceedings with Estonia, the first of the new member states to meet its visa requirements.
The commission also confirmed that three new waiver agreements had been reached – with Uruguay, Costa Rica and Paraguay – while progress was being made with Brazil, Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei.
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