Hey, as the recent Boston Marathon bombings made clear, the US and Russia are both beset by more-or-less the same terrorist threats, right?* So why shouldn’t Russia gain access to the same sort of detailed incoming airline passenger data – credit card numbers, names and addresses of contacts at their incoming destination, and the like – that the American authorities now get?

Russland will Fluggastdaten aus EU-Ländern – sonst droht Moskau mit Flugverboten, schreibt Javier Cáceres http://t.co/3tIMurrKif

June 3, 2013 5:22 am via SZ AutotweedReplyRetweetFavorite

@SZ

Süddeutsche Zeitung

That’s what the Russian government is now demanding, as we learn from that tweeted article from Süddeutsche Zeitung Brussels correspondent Javier Cárceres. And it wants such access beginning 1 July.

That’s a problem though: the important thing the Americans have that the Russians don’t is a data-protection agreement they worked out prior with EU authorities, so that at least some sort of control is agreed about where such data goes on to after it is delivered. In fact, it’s illegal in the EU to provide that without a data protection agreement in place – and it’s unlikely that such an agreement can be concluded in the less than a month that remains before that 1 July deadline. (By the way, this decree from the Russian Transport Minister applies to passengers of any vehicle entering Russian territory – airplane, but also train, bus, ship.)

So now airlines that fly to or over Russia have a problem: if the decree does go through, they won’t legally be able to deliver the data the Russian authorities will be demanding to authorize their flight. But perhaps top-level EU and Russian authorities were able to make progress on this question at the EU-Russia summit that concluded yesterday (4 June) in Yekaterinburg, Russia. We’ll presumably find out soon – but don’t get your hopes up. Before being blindsided by this Russian government announcement, the EU representation had expected to go to the summit in part to discuss measures to make EU visas easier to get for Russian citizens – and vice-versa. This goal has hardly been made any easier by the Russian move.

And remember the demonstration effect, as well: an MEP is further quoted in this piece about how Qatar and Saudi Arabia are also thinking about demanding similar information about passengers coming to their lands.

* Yes, of course this assertion is ridiculous.

Now this is interesting – if also a little obscure. One of the current lesser crises going on (so that you barely hear about it) is the erosion of the EU’s Schengen Treaty whereby a large subset of member-states allow travel among themselves with absolutely no border controls. Now this arrangement – formerly the pride of the EU, on par with the common currenchy – is on the back foot, mainly due to the flood of refugees coming from North Africa (a by-product of the “Arab Spring”) and the general loss of member-state confidence that the Italian authorities at the first line of defence can keep them out before they do get into Italy and thereby into the Schengen zone, from where they have many options for further uncontrolled inter-EU travel. France was loudly talking about re-imposing controls on its Italian border a while back, while Denmark has actually done so on its border with Germany – to the sputtering protests (with no attendant action) of EU authorities.

In the middle of this, as the leading Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza now reports, the EU Commission is likely to open up visa-free travel from Russia. Well, not really all of Russia – but rather that strange Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, stuck there between Poland and Lithuania, outside of Russia proper. Oh, and they won’t actually be able to go to Lithuania – just to Poland. And, to make it clear, there still will be border controls in place, these Kaliningradians (?) will just be able to go through them (presumably flashing their Russian passports) without having to go through the trouble of getting a visa beforehand.

Then again, Poland itself has been within the Schengen zone for a while now; who knows where some of them will want to go on to from there? But the Commission is seemingly willing to take that chance and announce such visa-free entry tomorrow; according to the article (no by-line), it’s motivation is essentially that it feels sorry for the Kaliningradians, they must be so lonely: “to avoid the isolation of Kaliningrad from its immediate neighbors, it is necessary to ease the travel of its citizens.” Because that sort of isolation can’t be very healthy for any body politic.

Don’t laugh: since Kaliningrad was first isolated this way by the independence of Lithuania in 1990, it’s been mainly known (when noticed at all) for the shady activities of all sorts going on there: weapon-smuggling, alcohol/cigarette-smuggling, the dispatch of freighters with suspicious cargoes, and the like. This is quite simply a gesture to persuade people there to start behaving themselves.

Grizzled EuroSavant veterans might recall the entry of earlier this year describing the dismay in Poland over the tight US regime for obtaining visas to visit the States, which included a first-person account – “Ally Out in the Cold” – of one Pole’s ordeal in visiting the US embassy in Warsaw to try to obtain his own visa.

That experience, as the article’s title suggests, featured quite a bit of excruciating waiting outside the embassy in the Polish January cold. For a change-of-pace – but, it turns out, of the most minor sort – we now have Miroslav Zajíicek’s account of what he had to go through for his visa in July’s summer heat at the American embassy in Prague (The Americans Give Lucie Priority), in the latest issue of the Czech opinion weekly Respekt. (more…)

For many people around the world, mainly either those actively wanting to or at least thinking about traveling to the United States, the big event marking this past first-business-week of the New Year was the introduction last Monday at America’s seaports and airports of mandatory procedures involving the photographing and fingerprinting of most foreign entrants. In one sense, this was just the sequel to the “air marshal” flap happening just before, as yet one more unilateral demand placed by the Bush administration on travel to the US, placed out there for other involved countries to “take it or leave it,” although resistance to this so far has been less than to the demand for air marshalls.

However, see this NYT article for the great Brazilian exception, where authorities – spurred by a judge’s ruling – have in turn instituted the requirement that all Americans entering Brazil be photographed and fingerprinted. And that’s all Americans – the article makes mention that even American diplomats, plus visiting US Senator Pat Roberts, were required to deliver up mugshots and prints – and a better solution is hard to imagine for the obvious problem here that the high-and-mighty setting such US policy normally get to remain blissfully unaware of the impact their decisions have on the everyday lives of ordinarily mortals. There just remains the task of getting George W. Bush to pose in an airport somewhere, which would have the collateral benefit of greatly assisting those many hundreds of thousands of anti-US-policy protesters in Western Europe whose own attempts at fashioning a Bush mugshot on the posters and placards they march with in the streets have too often been hopelessly amateurish.

Another reason resistance is less to the new mugshot-and-prints regime is that citizens from a core of 27 countries (mostly Western European) seen as low-risk and/or particularly friendly to US policy (plus Canada) are exempt. Unfortunately, it’s questionable whether the friendliness of the country and the degree of terrorist risk posed by its citizens are very much correlated; you can grasp this by recalling that that gentleman (now locked up in perpetuity) who two years ago tried to blow up a US-bound flight with explosives hidden in his tennis-shoes was a French national, as well as by reading this excellent opinion-piece on the whole issue in today’s Washington Post’s “Outlook” section. (Then there are those of you asking aloud now “What, France? A ‘friendly country’?” Sillies, for all the Franco-American policy differences of recent years, clearly from geopolitical and immigration perspectives France belongs in that camp of 27.)

But back to the new requirements for folks from what you could call the “great unwashed” parts of the world who would like to visit America, and in particular Poland. Yep, the Poles also belong to those “great unwashed,” notwithstanding things like the prompt and firm support the Polish government provided the Bush administration when it came to Iraq. The Poles are not happy with the new requirements, naturally. Surprisingly, though, a review of Polish press coverage of the matter has convinced me that this development itself barely rates “man-bites-dog” newsworthy status. Rather, the new requirements are merely the latest riff on what Poles perceive to be an ongoing insult – namely that they are required to obtain visas to visit the US at all. What’s more, George W. Bush’s announcement of this past week of proposed changes to US immigration law to grant amnesty in certain cases to illegals in the US turned out 1) To be directly relevant to the mugshot-and-photo issue, and 2) To be of much more interest to Poles. Intrigued? Just click on “More…”

Once again, on this issue Gazeta Wyborcza wins the prize for the extensiveness of its coverage; it builds a handy collection of links to its various articles on a page entitled Should We Introduce Visas for the USA? (more…)