Do the immigration agencies of EU member states keep records of EU citizens entry/exit from the Schengen zone?
For example, a would the exit of a say a Dutch national travelling on a Dutch passport via a German international airport to an Asian country be logged? If yes, for how long is this information retained?
Also, does it make a difference if the automated ePassport gates are used rather than the human officers?
Best Answer
As of December 2015, there isn't even any Schengen-wide record of entries and exits for visa holders, let alone EU citizens or visa-exempt third-country nationals. For EU citizens, Schengen rules do not mandate any record or even anything else than a manual document check (by contrast, third-country nationals details should be checked against lists of banned or wanted persons). Some countries strive for 100% database look-up even for people travelling on an EU passport (especially against lists of stolen or invalid documents) but that is not mandatory either.
Depending on the country, comings and goings can therefore be recorded based on airlines records or a scan at the border but that information is presently not shared or consolidated. As GayotFow already explained, this is slated to change but that's still an ongoing process.
Anecdotally, it's been a few years since the last time I travelled outside the Schengen area through a land border but my personal experience is that it was still possible to enter the Schengen area based on a cursory visual inspection of your ID, which would not be recorded anywhere.
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Do Schengen countries share immigration information?
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Answer 2
If they do, at least they don't do it consistently and systematically.
I had a non-RFID EU passport until a few months ago -- whenever I crossed the external Schengen borders, the border guards would glance at the ID page and wave me through, not spending enough time to write down anything, nor scan the machine-readable zone with a device that could do any logging.
It's technologically conceivable that information from RFID passports is being logged, but I doubt it.
(And certainly the border guard manning the exit booth at a German airport wouldn't know that the Dutch national in your scenario was going to such-and-such Asian country specifically).
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