The Immigration and Border Service indicated this Thursday that “satisfactory results” were achieved in the processing of passengers at the airports of Lisbon, Porto, Faro, Funchal and Ponta Delgada in the two months of application of the IATA Summer 2022 Contingency Plan.
In a statement on the balance of said contingency plan, the SEF referred to having controlled around 3,500,000 passengers and 9,500 flights since its entry into force on June 4, with the aim of “strengthening the control capacity at the external air border of the European Union, guaranteeing the security of Portugal and the rest of the Schengen Area”, and promoting “the desired fluidity in the processing of passengers entering and leaving the country through (…) the air borders”.
According to the security service, they were hit in the period in question.”Satisfactory passenger processing resultswith the almost inexistence of notable restrictions in the border control at the entrance and exit of the country (…) which translated into a very significant reduction in the maximum waiting time per passenger”, despite the “large number of flights and the volume of passengers”.
The contingency plan –based on the reinforcement of human resources assigned to airports and on new technological and operational solutions– “allowed the extension of electronic border control (E-gates) to nationals of third countries with a strong expression in terms of tourist flow and that do not represent a migratory or security risk (United States of America and Canada), allowing the processing of around 106,000 passengers of these nationalities in the five national airports, in the last 60 days”.
The statement highlights the operational results obtained and that are not limited to the normal processing of passengers at border control, indicating that in the last two months, within the scope of the SEF, were detected at the air borders “more than 110 falsified documents and more than 100 arrests and about 500 denials of entry, the majority due to lack of an adequate visa and/or lack of accreditation of the object and conditions of the stay”, in addition to having been presented “more than Se They detected 100 asylum applications and more than 1,300 precautionary measures.”
The Minister of the Interior, which is supervised by the SEF, had already said on July 19 that the implementation of the Summer Contingency Plan IATA 2022 will allow”a significant drop” of waiting times at airports in June and the first half of July, from about two hours to less than 60 minutes.
José Luís Carneiro stated at the time, in parliament, that the average waiting time throughout the month of July was 49 minutes, compared to 111 minutes in May.
Source: Observadora
