Visa question: Validity of visas (multi-entry)
Dear Rob/Editor,
This morning my wife got her passport back from VFS Global in Bangkok with her new Schengen visa in it. Unfortunately, again with a validity of 3 months, while in the past she has already received 1 year and 3 years. I had asked for 3 or 5 years in the letter.
Are longer visas no longer being issued at all or does anyone have other experiences?
Regards,
Ronald
******
Dear Ronald,
Unfortunately you do not mention when that previous visa was issued, so I will first list the Schengen regulations. The following rules have been in force here since February 2020, which state that a visa with a longer term validity, or a Multiple Entry Visa (MEV), must be issued in the following order. Member States may be more generous in this regard if they wish, although a visa will never be valid longer than the expiry date of the passport. They may decide to issue a short-term visa only in individual cases, where there are doubts about the applicant.
- The MEV is valid for 1 year provided that the applicant has obtained and lawfully used three visas in the previous two years.
- The MEV is valid for 2 years, provided that the applicant has obtained and lawfully used an MEV issued earlier with a validity of one year in the previous two years.
- The MEV is valid for 5 years, provided that the applicant has obtained and lawfully used an MEV issued earlier with a validity of two years in the previous three years.
The Netherlands is (was?) always generous in issuing an MEV. If the foreign national has previously had a Schengen visa, it is more favorable for both the foreign national and the embassy (BuZa) to issue all subsequent visas with increasingly favorable conditions. This saves both parties time and money.
If your girlfriend has received an MEV according to the overview above, then I suspect that a mistake has been made there. Since mid-2022 travel and visa applications have picked up again - Covid measures have expired - there have been backlogs in many areas due to a shortage of staff. It is therefore possible that an official has issued a visa of too short a duration due to haste or inexperience. You could object to this or simply ask the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for an explanation.
On the next application, you could explicitly ask for a longer term visa with the rules as described above in your cover letter and then request the MEV type according to the type established in the Schengen Visa Code.
Yours faithfully,
Rob V
NB: For reference, the rules regarding the MEV can be found in article 24, paragraph 2 of the Visa Code: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/NL/TXT/?uri=celex%3A32019R1155