A Covid-19 screening center at Roissy airport, February 5, 2021. – Jacques Witt / SIPA
We will have to wait a little more than two months before seeing the European health passport materialize. The European Parliament will indeed be ready to ratify it during its plenary session from June 7 to 10, the chairman of the parliamentary committee responsible for the file said on Monday.
The same day the European Commission, which proposed this “digital green certificate” on March 17, declared that it planned to enter into force “by June”, without further details. This document is intended, with a view to the summer season, to facilitate travel for Europeans who can thus certify that they have been vaccinated against Covid-19, have passed a negative PCR test or are immunized after having been infected.
An emergency procedure
MEPs agreed last Thursday to vote on this proposal for a regulation as part of an emergency procedure. A usual legislative procedure, involving the European Parliament and the Council (institution representing the Member States), can sometimes take years. Spanish MEP Juan Fernando Lopez Aguilar (Socialists & Democrats group), who will be responsible for leading negotiations with the Council on this text, for his part insisted on Monday on the necessary protection of personal data that will be used, the limitation in time of this mechanism and the importance of non-discrimination against people who have not been vaccinated.
Parliament must vote on its negotiating mandate as well as the amendments in April, continued the MEP. He aims for the text to be adopted in May by the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs which he chairs, before a vote by Parliament in plenary in June. The regulation could then enter into force, after adoption by the Council and publication in the Official Journal of the EU.
The Portuguese Secretary of State for Tourism Rita Marques, however, underlined that her country had already started to set up this type of certificate without waiting for the entry into force of the regulation setting a harmonized European framework. “We cannot wait until June 1, 10 or 30,” she explained. Until then, “we will continue to use” our device.