Tourism Minister Clayton Bartolo said that Malta is at the forefront of Europe in digital green certificate preparations.

He was responding to a number of Parliamentary Questions posed by MPs, including Claudio Grech and Jean Claude Micallef.

He said that “the vaccine passport, or green pass or digital certificate will play an important role. I can announce that as a government we are at the forefront of preparations to have a digital certificate and MITA conducted a lot of work over the past weeks where, together with the public health authorities, necessary work was done. We are at the forefront of Europe in this work.”

The digital certificate, he said, will work with a unique QR code which will have the dates of when the first dose was administered and when the second was administered, among other information.

GDPR guidelines will be followed.

Bartolo also said that the tourism sector is on everyone’s minds and that the certificate discussions are being held by the European Commission. He said, however, that Malta will not just limit discussions there. “If EC discussions take longer than projected or we see that they will make us lose out from recuperating effectively, then we will enter into bilateral agreements, like we are doing with the UK. We have already exchanged information with the UK on the components of our certificate and of theirs.”

Turning to seat capacity projections for the country, he said that such numbers would not just depend on Malta, but also on airlines. “We are in continuous discussions with airlines to try and bring as many seats as possible. We identified airlines that, due to pandemic, were not carrying out their long haul flights, and we did what we can to turn those slots to Malta. Today we have no less than 70% of the 2019 routes covered.”