ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the progressive digitalisation of the European Union's Schengen visa procedure and asks whether gains in administrative efficiency come at the expense of applicants’ fundamental rights. After situating the common visa policy in its legal and policy context, it first analyses the evolution of the Visa Information System (VIS), originally conceived in a security-driven post-9/11 environment and gradually expanded to multiple purposes: preventing “visa shopping” and fraud, supporting border checks and migration management and enabling law enforcement and internal security uses. The 2021 reform broadens the personal scope of the VIS to cover long-stay visas and residence permits, lowers the fingerprinting age threshold and introduces automatic cross-checks against other large-scale EU IT systems, Europol and Interpol databases, risk indicators and dedicated watchlists.
These developments raise serious concerns in terms of proportionality, data quality, privacy and data protection, as well as the breadth and oversight of law enforcement access, including the risks of false matches and de facto large-scale surveillance of third-country nationals. The chapter then explores the partial digitalisation of the application process through the EU Visa Application Platform and the introduction of a fully digital visa. It argues that online lodging of applications and expanded data collection shift the burden of data accuracy and completeness onto applicants, potentially exacerbating digital divides and interacting problematically with persisting national divergences in visa practice.
Finally, the chapter considers the deployment of algorithms and AI-enabled tools for pre-screening and triaging visa applications, highlighting risks of indirect and intersectional discrimination, opacity, automation bias and weakened guarantees of effective judicial redress. Drawing on case studies from the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, it shows how visa triaging systems can entrench profiling based on nationality and socio-demographic characteristics. Overall, the chapter concludes that digitalisation tends to streamline procedures primarily for national administrations, while the safeguards for visa applicants’ fundamental rights remain fragile and underdeveloped.
