Brussels, June 12, 2026 (Lusa) - The European Commissioner for Internal Affairs and Migration, Magnus Brunner, believes that Portugal has made “significant progress in recent weeks” with the new European border control system, stating that an increase in resources has made it possible to overcome “initial problems”.
“There were some problems at the start, because there were limited staff and equipment. But now, Portugal has bolstered its resources and things are going quite well,” said Magnus Brunner in a series of interviews with the Lusa news agency and other European media outlets in Brussels.
The Commissioner considered that the linking of the bottlenecks at Lisbon Airport with the full entry into force of the new European Entry/Exit System (EES) on 10 April was due to a “media misunderstanding, whether deliberate or not”.
“What we actually found, and this is a good example, was that when complaints about queues at Lisbon Airport first emerged, Lisbon Airport was still awaiting integration into the EES. So another factor must have caused the issue,” he said.
Magnus Brunner added that there had been other misunderstandings regarding the EES in Europe, not just in Lisbon, noting that in some cases people had complained about queues unrelated to the entry into force of the new border control system, which applies exclusively to non-European Union (EU) citizens.
“They said: ‘We had to wait in the queues.’ So we asked: ‘But are you a European citizen or a non-European citizen?’ And they replied: ‘Of course I’m European.’ So that explanation made no sense, because the EES applies only to non-European citizens. So, [the person] was either in the wrong queue, or perhaps something else was happening at that airport or at that border,” he said.
The European Commissioner said that, overall, the new border control system “is working well”, noting that there are European airports where “the average processing time is 30 seconds”.
“Others may be lagging behind a little, but I must say that Portugal has made significant progress in recent weeks,” he said.
According to Magnus Brunner, since the EES came fully into force on 10 April, the system has processed 90 million records, and border authorities have refused 40,000 entries into the European area due to the use of false documents.
“Of those 40,000 refusals, around 1,000 occurred because the individuals concerned posed a threat to EU security,” he stated.
The EES is an EU automated system that replaces the passport stamp with the digital recording of biometric data (photograph and fingerprints) for non-EU citizens.
This new system, which came into full effect on 10 April, began to be progressively implemented in Portugal and the other Schengen countries on 12 October.
Since then, waiting times at air borders have lengthened, particularly at Lisbon Airport, with passengers sometimes waiting several hours.
To mitigate these constraints, the PSP police force has resorted to partially suspending the collection of biometric data in “exceptional circumstances”, namely when “waiting times at an airport border post become excessive”, PSP spokesperson Sérgio Soares told Lusa.
TA/ADB // ADB.
Lusa
