Nine States Seek Border Delay

When the EU switched on its new digital border system last autumn, the quiet assumption in Brussels was that the newer Schengen countries would be the ones found wanting. Nine months on, that assumption looks a little too neat. Croatia, admitted to the Schengen free-travel area only in 2023, says the Entry/Exit System (EES) is working smoothly at its frontiers. The countries now asking the Commission for emergency breathing space are Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands and Portugal, along with Switzerland (Euronews, Travel Tomorrow).

EES replaced passport stamps with electronic records for every non-EU traveller entering or leaving the Schengen area. On the first crossing, border officers take a facial image and fingerprints (EES Regulation). The system went live in October 2025. The EU made the law, its IT agency eu-LISA built and runs the shared database, but national border authorities still carry out the checks in real airports, ports and land crossings. That division of labour is where the trouble begins.

Five Hours at the Gate

The first biometric registration takes about 60 to 90 seconds per traveller, according to French operational estimates (Le Monde). That sounds manageable until it is multiplied across a July wave of long-haul arrivals, British holidaymakers and connecting passengers. Then the queue stops being a queue and becomes the airport’s main event.

French airports have reported waits of up to five hours and missed connections (Ouest-France). At Berlin Brandenburg, non-EU passengers have waited up to two hours, according to its chief executive Aletta von Massenbach (Berliner Zeitung). Greek island airports, heavily exposed to British tourist traffic, are under the same pressure (The Guardian).

There is still no comprehensive public data on waiting times, kiosk reliability or biometric enrolment errors across Schengen border points. That matters. Without it, the comforting line about "minor teething problems" and the claim that the whole system is failing are both being built on partial evidence.

What the Nine Countries Want

The nine countries are not trying to scrap EES. Their demand is more precise: they want the Commission to extend a grace period, granted when the system launched, that allows border officers to pause biometric capture during extreme congestion while still recording entries and exits electronically. That grace period expires on 6 September (Connexion).

The Commission has refused a blanket suspension. Its argument is that the delays reflect national staffing shortages rather than a flaw in the shared system (CNN Greece). Croatia’s interior minister, Davor Božinović, has made the same point more bluntly, saying his country prepared properly and has no major problems. Coming from a state that spent years being judged by older members on whether it could police the Schengen frontier, the message carries a certain edge: the system works if governments do the work.

The strongest criticism runs in the opposite direction. Alexander Zinell, chief executive of Fraport Greece, has called EES fundamentally flawed and said it needs a full redesign, including pre-registration before travel rather than processing everyone at the booth (The Guardian, Newsbeast). Greek airports also have too few trained border staff, a domestic weakness that EES did not create but has exposed sharply (Dnews).

What September Settles

The 6 September deadline now forces a decision. If the grace period expires, every Schengen external-border crossing must run full biometric enrolment even at peak volume. If the Commission extends it, biometric capture becomes something that can be set aside when pressure builds. That would weaken the central promise behind EES: verified entry and exit records for every non-EU traveller. The disruption has probably already pushed ETIAS, the separate pre-travel authorisation system, into 2027, even though the EU’s official timetable still says late 2026 (travel-europe.europa.eu, Euronews).

Ireland sits outside Schengen, protected by the Common Travel Area with Britain, so this is not a Dublin Airport system in the same way. But Irish travellers know the practical meaning of Schengen’s external border: it is the gate you meet when flying into Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Lisbon or Athens before moving freely inside much of Europe. For British travellers, now counted as non-EU passengers, the change is even more direct, and that is why Greek islands and other holiday routes are feeling it so visibly.

The legal case for EES is strong, and the security logic is straightforward. Schengen’s internal free movement depends politically on a credible external border. But the EU wrote one common rule and left delivery to 29 different sets of airports, ports and border posts. The same regulation can produce smooth checks in Zagreb and five-hour queues in Paris. That capacity gap is now the Commission’s problem, whether it wants to call it a design flaw or not.