On 27 October 2021, eu-LISA held its 8th Annual Conference “Towards the Digital Schengen Area”. Organised in cooperation with the Slovenian Presidency of the Council of the European Union, the event was held online.
This year’s conference took stock of current developments in the Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) area in which the upcoming launch of the Entry/Exit System (EES), the European Travel Information Authorisation System (ETIAS) and the new Interoperability architecture will create a new and modern gateway at European external borders. Further to that, handling the COVID-19 pandemic has sparked new initiatives, such as vaccination passports and medical tests, all affecting traditional border checks.
Progressively, the EU has been moving towards centralised and standardised information exchange in the JHA domain. The Conference provided an opportunity to debate how large-scale IT systems and a new information architecture could support intelligence gathering in order to improve the overall travel experience. Among the questions related to travel experience, the conference focused in particular on lessons learnt from the COVID-19 pandemic, on the next generation of the Schengen Area’s invisible borders and on new travel intelligence. It raised an opportunity to openly talk about the shortcomings and the experiences gained while deploying modern technologies at external borders.
The speaker line-up included high-level decision makers from EU Institutions and Agencies as well as from International Organisations and EU Member States.
