The European Commission issued an emergency decision late on 4 May permitting all Schengen states, including Belgium, to suspend mandatory fingerprint- and face-scan enrolment under the new Entry/Exit System (EES) whenever queues grow unmanageable. Since the EES went live on 10 April, non-EU travellers at Brussels Airport and the Eurostar terminal in Brussels-Midi have reported waits of up to an hour, threatening onward connections and corporate schedules. Under the new flexibility, Belgian border police may temporarily revert to old-fashioned passport stamping while continuing to record travellers’ data in the background database. The measure is strictly time-bound: local commanders must document each suspension and restore full biometrics once lines fall below predefined thresholds.
![EU Allows Temporary Pause on Biometric Checks, Easing Pressure on Belgian Borders]()
For travellers seeking personalised guidance amid these evolving border procedures, VisaHQ offers up-to-date Schengen entry advice and can facilitate Belgian visa applications end-to-end; visit https://www.visahq.com/belgium/ for details.
Ireland and Cyprus, which are outside Schengen, are unaffected. Business-travel stakeholders welcomed the move. Airlines for Europe (A4E) said ad-hoc suspensions should reduce denied-boarding cases, while the Belgian Travel Organisation urged companies to add at least 30 minutes to connection buffers until the impact is clearer. However, immigration lawyers cautioned that manual stamps could complicate the 90/180-day Schengen-stay calculation for frequent flyers, reminding employers to track days in country meticulously. Longer term, the Commission confirmed that it is accelerating work on a fully digital EU-visa platform and the launch of ETIAS in October 2026. Belgian IT providers involved in the projects told The Brussels Times that lessons learned from the EES rollout—especially around airport staffing—will feed directly into the next phases. For global mobility teams the takeaway is twofold: build extra transit time into itineraries for non-EU assignees over the coming months, and update internal compliance tools so that manual passport stamps are captured and reconciled against electronic travel-history data.
For travellers seeking personalised guidance amid these evolving border procedures, VisaHQ offers up-to-date Schengen entry advice and can facilitate Belgian visa applications end-to-end; visit https://www.visahq.com/belgium/ for details.
Ireland and Cyprus, which are outside Schengen, are unaffected. Business-travel stakeholders welcomed the move. Airlines for Europe (A4E) said ad-hoc suspensions should reduce denied-boarding cases, while the Belgian Travel Organisation urged companies to add at least 30 minutes to connection buffers until the impact is clearer. However, immigration lawyers cautioned that manual stamps could complicate the 90/180-day Schengen-stay calculation for frequent flyers, reminding employers to track days in country meticulously. Longer term, the Commission confirmed that it is accelerating work on a fully digital EU-visa platform and the launch of ETIAS in October 2026. Belgian IT providers involved in the projects told The Brussels Times that lessons learned from the EES rollout—especially around airport staffing—will feed directly into the next phases. For global mobility teams the takeaway is twofold: build extra transit time into itineraries for non-EU assignees over the coming months, and update internal compliance tools so that manual passport stamps are captured and reconciled against electronic travel-history data.
