Schengen Visa

What is Schengen Visa ?

This article is about the Agreement and subsequent legislation from a historic point of view.

Schengen Area

Description Free travel area

Established 1995

Members

25 Countries

Policy of European Union

Area 4,312,099 km2

The Schengen Agreement is a treaty signed on 14 June 1985 near the town of Schengen in Luxembourg, between five of the ten member states of the European Economic Community. It was supplemented by the Convention implementing the Schengen Agreement 5 years later. Together these treaties created Europe's borderless Schengen Area, which operates very much like a single state for international travel with external border controls for travellers travelling in and out of the area, but with no internal border controls.

The Schengen Agreements and the rules adopted under them were, for the EU members of the Agreement, entirely separate from the EU structures until the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty, which incorporated them into the mainstream of European Union law. The borderless zone created by the Schengen Agreements, the Schengen Area, currently consists of 25 European countries, covering a population of over 400 million people and an area of 4,312,099 square kilometers (1,664,911 sq mi).