Passports of the European Union
Passports issued by the 27 member states of the European Union follow a common design and grant their holders EU citizenship rights.
[1] The design features a colored cover (for which burgundy is recommended:[1] all countries except Croatia follow this recommendation) emblazoned—in the official language(s) of the issuing country (and sometimes its translation into English and French)—with the title "European Union", followed by the name(s) of the member state, the heraldic "Arms" of the State concerned, the word "PASSPORT", together with the biometric passport symbol at the bottom center of the front cover.
[3] With a valid passport, EU citizens are entitled to exercise the right of free movement (meaning they do not need a visa, a certain amount of money, or a certain reason to travel freely and no residence permit for settling) in the European Economic Area (European Union, Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway), Switzerland and, before 31 December 2020 in the United Kingdom.
[5][6] When going through border controls to enter an aforementioned country, citizens possessing valid biometric passports are sometimes able to use automated gates instead of immigration counters.
[8] Strictly speaking, it is not necessary for an EU citizen to possess a valid passport or national identity card to enter the EEA or Switzerland.
[9][10][11][12] While considerable progress has been made in harmonizing some features, the data page can be found at the front or at the back of an EU passport booklet and there are significant design differences throughout to indicate which member state is the issuer.
[note 1] Since the 1980s, European Union member states have started to harmonize aspects of the designs of their ordinary passport booklets.
[15] EU law requires member states to take two fingerprints, except for children under twelve years old or individuals with a physical or mental impairment.
It is designed in a way so that computers can fairly easily read the information, although still human readable, since it contains only letters (A–Z), digits and "<" as space character, but no bar code or similar.
The following mapping is specified for EU languages: å → AA; ä/æ → AE; ö/ø/œ → OE, ü → UE (German) or UXX (Spanish) and ß → SS.
The ICAO mapping is mostly used for computer-generated and internationally used documents such as air tickets, but sometimes (like in US visas) also simple letters are used (MULLER, GOSSMANN).
(The machine-readable has room for 39 letters for the name while the visual zone can contain as many as will fit)[citation needed] Optional information on the following page: If abroad, Austrian embassies and consulates
Non EU navy blue passports were first issued in March 2020, unlike previous designs the biodata page is now made of polycarbonate.
It can also be needed to circumvent the fact that visitors whose passports show evidence of a visit to Israel are not allowed to enter Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen (It is, however, possible to get the Israeli entry and exit stamp on a separate piece of paper).
