The EU council brought the decision of annulling the travel bans for 15 countries and reopening of external borders. The decision is valid from July 1st onward. A particular diplomatic source confirmed earlier this week that the list of 15 countries received enough votes to pass. The decision of making this list went through controversies earlier after some sources revealed that the United States were not included among the mentioned countries. Despite the second wave of the epidemic, China also entered the list so EU citizens can travel there as well. The final version of the list does not include Brazil, US and Russia. However, it was mentioned that EU will revisit this list every two weeks and additional counties that are showing positive trend and better epidemiological picture will be granted access. Also, this does not necessarily means that US citizens cannot come to Croatia but only to countries that are in Schengen zone. Check our article to learn is Americans can come to Croatia after July 1.
The official European Union said that the list was made according to the number of coronavirus cases in the last 14 days, general trend of the cases in above mentioned countries and the ability of national governments to handle the undergoing crisis. On last Thursday, there were reports that 54 countries are in consideration for border liberating. But the list was eventually reduced to just 15 countries. At the end, European Union will give freedom to its member countries to make decisions for border opening. In some cases, countries could reintroduce internal borders. The full list of the countries is mentioned below.
- Algeria
- Australia
- Canada
- Georgia
- Japan
- Montenegro
- Morocco
- New Zealand
- Rwanda
- Serbia
- South Korea
- Thailand
- Tunisia
- Uruguay
- China (Subject to confirmation of reciprocity)
In a statement, spokespersons of European Union said “Residents of Andorra, Monaco, San Marino and the Vatican should be considered as EU residents for purpose of this recommendation”.
Initially, there were some disagreements between countries about the criteria that is used for this decision. The source of the problem was an indication that the given data about the coronavirus is not reliable. Informants said that the State asked the ECDC (the EU agency for disease preventing) to give more thorough details. They emphasized that the lists of countries will be reviewed every two weeks. Several weeks ago, when the EU published their guidelines, officials said that they would take the infection rate in the countries that were the part of concern.
