Can anyone explain what this agreement is exactly. My understanding is quite basic and I would love to understand this more completely.

And what does this mean for an American traveling between (or through) a Schengen nation?

Thanks in advance!

For travellers mainly... No border control between the countries in the agreement. For visitors that require visa's they can obtain a Schengen visa from one country and have it cover travel to others.

The German immigration service has a good overview in English at:

http://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/www/e...chengen_html#1

Parties to the agreement:

- Germany
- France
- Belgium
- Luxembourg
- Spain
- Portugal
- Greece
- Austria
- Denmark
- Finland
- Sweden

Norway and Iceland are "in" via adoption of the nordic passport agreement.

Denmark, Ireland and the UK have rights to be part, but only do so in part. (UK so far doesn't apply to the agreement due to fears of asylum seekers flooding into the UK)

PS: Most intra Europe flights from one Schengen country to another put you into an arrival area of the airport where you do NOT go through immigration. Departure areas as such are also seperated to not allow schengen connections and NON-Schengen to mingle. It is typical for intra country domestic flights and schengen to mix at SOME airports as passport controls aren't needed.

In essence, mainly flights to/from the UK or to/from Switzerland to Schengen countries will get you the exposure to passport checks. Ireland seems to be one way or the other... as I've seen sometimes NO border control on flights from France or Germany.. then the next visit they are back. I'm not fully clear on the Irish governments virw on this.

Countries can STILL ask you for a passport for a random check or other reason.

[This message has been edited by NickP 1K (edited 09-17-2003).]

Thanks NickP! This is the basic/general information I was looking for!

I'm sure Ireland would love to fully lower its borders to the other Schengen countries, but officially they are not allowed to do so because they have a decades-old agreement with the UK to permit passport-free movement between the two countries (particularly useful for travel to/from Northern Ireland). Due to the UK's paranoia regarding asylum seekers, Ireland is supposed to maintain stringent UK-style passport checks on all flights and ships to/from Schengen countries like France and Germany. In practice, I suspect that the checks are not implemented all the time.

The other confusing thing is that the UK and Ireland both have periodic bouts of "security checks", where on UK-Ireland flights you are asked for a form of ID, or otherwise asked to simply state your nationality. Of course, if the UK joined Schengen then this nonsense would be at an end, though I bet BAA (the operator of many British airports) would have a nightmare creating Schengen and non-Schengen zones at places like LHR

[This message has been edited by House (edited 09-17-2003).]

[This message has been edited by House (edited 09-17-2003).]

If this means anything, last time I was at LHR, they had a slew of Intra-european flights landing at once, and since most of the flights are international into that airport, they went through passport control. They allowed citizens from the EU, EEC, some other organization, and Swiss citizens to go through the line, all they had to do is show their picture page of the passport and they were waved through, nothing was formally checked.

This seems to be an "open border" of sorts, but they wanted to make sure that those who were supposed to be in the correct line (ie, the american like myself cheating through the EU line) were.

last time I was at LHR, they had a slew of Intra-european flights landing at once, and since most of the flights are international into that airport, they went through passport control. They allowed citizens from the EU, EEC, some other organization, and Swiss citizens to go through the line, all they had to do is show their picture page of the passport and they were waved through, nothing was formally checked.

I (Swiss) was lucky last time at LHR too and just waived through!

Kind of. Because you have free movement within the EU/EEA (no visas required for anything, no time limits), the only check that needs to be done is an identity check. If your passport is from outside, stamps, visas, etc. do need to be checked. So it makes sense to have a separate section for these travellers. Not so much an open border, as free movement for certain people.

You've also got the 'blue channels' at customer - any citizen travelling within the EU (and this is strict EU this time, not EEA) doesn't have customs restrictions based on quantity. So, you have the right to go through a channel where the only search is for illegal items, rather than for taxation purposes. If you have luggage, the label is outlined with green stripes to show that you are allowed to use this channel. However, this falls down when, like me, you only ever travel with hand luggage, and so don't have luggage tags...

But even within Schengen, you still clear customs on arrival, based on the last country where you cleared customer, if at all. This means you can easily transfer from non-Schengen to Schengen with a passport control (and your luggage can be checked through).

Just to correct:

Denmark is a full Schengen member. The two non-EU countries Iceland and Norway have signed a Schengen cooperation agreement making them members of Schengen as well.

BTW: Schengen only deals with immigration control, and has nothing to do with customs.

The member states are not allowed to carry out immigration control (i.e. passport checks) for people travelling between the Schengen countries (only random checks at special occasions are permitted).

Don't forget the Netherlands and Italy. Schengen makes it incredibly convenient if you are visiting multiple countries.

[This message has been edited by nirvana (edited 09-19-2003).]

That's because the Swiss are regarded as honorary EU citizens!

There are two lines at UK passport control - the "fast track" one for citizens of the EU, the EEA and Switzerland, and the "slow" one for everybody else.

Very confusing, and I know that FAs gets this wrong on a regular basis. "Ladies and gentlemen, we are now distributing landing cards and you have to fill one in if you are not a citizen of a member state of the EU". WRONG! If you are Norwegian, Icelandic, Swiss or a citizen of Liechtenstein you don't have to fill one in either, and you use the EU line to go through passport control

Out of curiousity about Switzerland and Schengen:

1. When were the Swiss allowed to use Schengen/E.U. privileges through U.K. immigration? A few years ago (when Schengen had been implemented), I was in an immigration line at LON in front of a group of Swiss travellers.

2. As of April last year, there were cursory document checks going into and out of Switzerland from France (the French weren't really checking on people coming in from Switzerland).

Off the top of my head, I think the Swiss have been able to do this for many years now.

The French can sometimes be very haphazard about document checks. I think that's one reason why the UK is so firmly set against joining Schengen. A large proportion of the UK's illegal immigrants come through France but have no interest in staying there. You can see why the UK doesn't want effectively to hand over border policing to France.

If this also means anything, I met a guy who had a canadian passport, and he was traveling around europe, and he was flying from Greence to London, and when he was going through exit immigration in Athens, turns out that the French authorities didn't stamp his passport! Now, a canadian passport is about as good as gold, but they wanted to detain him for illegal entry, and then he showed his Eurorail passes and the reciepts for that and that he'd been traveling around, and his first ticket stub from CDG.

I better not leave Schengen from Greece then. I didn't get any entry or exit stamps on my last flights into Germany and France directly from/to the U.S..