Romania and Bulgaria will join the Schengen area as of January 1, 2025, European Parliament President Roberta Metsola announced on Thursday, December 12, on the X network.
“It’s done. It’s done. It is deserved. Romania and Bulgaria will fully join Schengen on January 1, 2025. Congratulations to the citizens of both countries who have worked long and hard for this. A stronger Schengen means a safer and more united Europe”, wrote Roberta Metsola, President of the European Parliament, on X.
The EU interior ministers decided it at a meeting. It also came after Austria and the Netherlands decided to drop their veto, which had been imposed for several years, and give the green light.
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Romania and Bulgaria have been waiting to join Schengen since 2011. The two countries, which share a long border, have agreed to work together to facilitate the implementation of the technical conditions.
The Schengen area is one of the most important achievements of the European project. It began in 1985 as an intergovernmental project between five EU countries – France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg – and has gradually expanded to become the world’s largest area of free movement.
Schengen is the name of a small village in Luxembourg on the border with Germany and France, where the Schengen Agreement and Schengen Convention were signed in 1985 and 1990, respectively.
Belonging to an area without internal border controls means that countries do not carry out checks at their internal borders, except in cases of specific threats, and carry out harmonized controls at their external borders based on clearly defined criteria. In recent years, due to the immigration crisis, more and more EU countries have reintroduced internal border controls, but these are temporary measures.
Currently, the Schengen area covers more than 4 million square kilometers, with a population of almost 420 million people, and includes 27 countries: 23 of the 27 EU member states plus all the members of the European Free Trade Association (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland).
On January 1, 2023, Croatia became the 27th full member of the Schengen area.