The European Union (E.U.) is planning to launch a Digital Green Certificate to kick-start foreign travel across Europe without discrimination.
The European Union (E.U.) is planning to launch a Digital Green Certificate to kick-start foreign travel across Europe without discrimination.
People who have taken both the jabs of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine or have tested negative or have recently recovered from the COVID-19, will be able to travel within Europe. The final details of the Digital Green Certificate are currently being worked upon.
Taking it to twitter, the official twitter handle of European Commission tweeted,
We are proposing to create a Digital Green Certificate to facilitate safe free movement inside the EU during the pandemic.
— European Commission 🇪🇺 (@EU_Commission) March 17, 2021
The certificate will:
✅ Be accessible and secure for all EU citizens
✅ Be non-discriminatory
✅ Contain only essential information#StrongerTogether
It further tweeted,
A digital green certificate is a proof that a person:
— European Commission 🇪🇺 (@EU_Commission) March 17, 2021
has been vaccinated against COVID-19,
recovered from COVID-19,
or received a negative test result.
It will be available free of charge as an electronic or paper version and will include a QR code to ensure authenticity. pic.twitter.com/2Y618sVjwE
The proposed Digital Green Certificate would be for all E.U. citizens, their families when they’re leaving the E.U. or living abroad. The European Commission wants to have Digital Green Certificates in place before the commencement of summer tourist season.
It will include a QR code to ensure security and authenticity of the certificate. The Commission will build a gateway to ensure all certificates are verified across the E.U. and support Member States in the technical implementation of certificates.
The proposal states that any E.U. member state permitting vaccinated travellers to bypass restrictions such as quarantine must accept certificates from other states within the bloc under the same conditions.
In such a case, that vaccines used for inoculation must be the one which has been approved by European Medicines Agency (EMA), E.U.’s agency in charge of the evaluation and supervision of medicinal products.
This becomes important because Hungary has already gone against the E.U. and accepted COVID-19 doses from China based Sinopharm and Russia’s Sputnik V, which are not approved by the EMA. The vaccines approved by EMA are Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, Oxford-AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson.
As per the data compiled by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, less than 5% of European citizens have been fully vaccinated amid delays in deliveries and production of vaccines. The European Commission, however, remains confident it can achieve its goal of 70% of the E.U. adult population being vaccinated by the end of the summer.
The economies of countries such as Greece, Spain and Italy are unlikely to recover until the tourist industry is reopened and they have been looking at ways to save the summer season while providing a safe environment for both travellers and local residents.
The Prime Minister of Greece – Kyriakos Mitsotakis has already welcomed the move and said that the move will significantly facilitate the movement of citizens and will help boost tourism and the economies that rely heavily on it.
The E.U. believes that Digital Green Certificate will convince the member states which have introduced travel restrictions aimed at slowing down the pace of new infections to lift their measures.
Separately, the World Health Organization (WHO) is working to create an international trusted framework for safe travel, for which vaccinations will not be a condition.
