Starting this Monday, Spain requires that travelers with a Senegalese passport have previously obtained a transit visa to be able to stopover at its airports, a measure adopted to try to prevent original migrants from this country from taking advantage of the stopover to request asylum. This is a measure adopted to alleviate the situation at Madrid’s Barajas airport, where a spike in arrivals of migrants from this and other African countries between December and January led to the saturation of services and the overflow of the rooms set up for applicants. of asylum.
In practice, part of the effect of this measure has already been felt, since Spain asked Morocco at the end of January to ban travelers with a Senegalese passport who do not have a Schengen visa from boarding commercial flights with a stopover in Spain. for this visa to come into force. They currently require a transit visa to make a stopover at any airport located in the territory of the Schengen States Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ghana, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia and Sri Lanka.
In the specific case of Spain, the following countries must be added: Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Cuba, Djibouti, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, India, Kenya, Liberia, Mali, Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, Syria, Tajikistan, Togo, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Yemen and Palestine.
The requirement for this permit has been a measure demanded by some sectors such as police unions, which have denounced the poor conditions in which agents have had to work during the Barajas crisis and ask that this requirement be extended to travelers with passports. from any sub-Saharan country.
On the other hand, the measure has been highly criticized by NGOs such as the Spanish Commission for Refugee Assistance, which considers that it “makes access to protection even more difficult” and is part of “the European border externalization strategy”, which “puts the lives of thousands of people in danger.