US President George Bush has signalled a resolution for that perennial bone of contention where citizens of certain EU member States, including Malta, still need to apply for a visa to visit the United States while other EU members have no such restrictions.
At the beginning of the month, President Bush announced he would be working with the US Congress and international partners to amend the so-called visa waiver programme to include Malta and another nine new EU member States.
However, on a recent visit to Estonia, he did stress that any easing of travel restrictions for the 10 countries would be coupled with increased security arrangements.
The US and EU have been at loggerheads over the issue for months and President Bush’s announcement has been seen as succumbing to EU pressure aimed at forcing Washington to grant equal US-entry rights to all EU citizens.
Such a compromise would undoubtedly go down well with the European Commission, which recently proposed imposing a visa requirement on American diplomats entering the EU should the US not accede to its repeated requests.
Maltese MEP Simon Busuttil had spearheaded a European Parliament initiative in late November, signed by 50 MEPS, which had called on the European Commission to press Washington to waive the visa requirement for the affected EU citizens.
As matters stand, citizens of the new EU member States, with the exception of Slovenians and with the inclusion of Greeks, need to go through a visa application process in order to visit the US, while American citizens have no such reciprocal visa requirements when visiting the countries in question.
Citizens from 14 “old” EU member States and Slovenia, meanwhile, are entitled to travel to the US without a visa and stay for up to 90 days for either business or pleasure. At the moment, citizens of just 27 countries are allowed entry into the US without a visa requirement.
Not only do Maltese have to apply for visas, usually a time- and patience-consuming ordeal involving lengthy queues outside and inside the US Embassy in Floriana, the modus operandi was recently made even more onerous for Maltese wanting to visit the US.
A new process introduced by the embassy in November necessitates Maltese having first to access an electronic visa application form on the embassy’s website, fill the form in on-line and print it out once completed. They then have to go to a Bank of Valletta branch, pay the visa application fee and collect a receipt of payment. Once done, the applicant proceeds to the embassy with the printed electronic form, the required photograph and the receipt of payment.
Referring to Bush’s statements on the issue, US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff commented, “We envision a secure travel authorisation system that will allow us to receive data about travellers from countries before they get on the plane. Countries that are willing to assist the United States in doing effective checks on travellers could be put on track to enter the programme soon.”
The US has repeatedly said that visa requirements would be waived in the case of the 10 EU States when the countries in question meet requirements such as a visa refusal rate of less than three per cent, and when the US has registered a low rate of visa overstayers from the countries in question. The countries, according to the US visa waiver programme, must also issue machine-readable passports, report the theft of any blank passports to the US authorities in a timely fashion, and have a programme to incorporate biometric identification into their passports – all requirements that Malta meets.
The EC has insisted that the US is hiding behind legislative criteria in its refusal to extend the visa waiver programme to the rest of the EU, insinuating that the decision is politically motivated and has called on the US to provide a country by country analysis of the criteria it considers have not been met – criteria the EC deems “discriminatory” and “at best questionable”.