The Schengen Agreement is a treaty signed on 14 June 1985 near the town of Schengen in Luxembourg, between five of the ten member states of the European Economic Community. It was supplemented by the Convention implementing the Schengen Agreement five years later. Together these treaties created Europe's borderless Schengen Area, which operates very much like a single state for international travel with external border controls for travellers travelling in and out of the area, but with no internal border controls.
The Schengen Agreements and the rules adopted under them were, for the EU members of the Agreement, entirely separate from the EU structures until the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty, which incorporated them into the mainstream of European Union law. The borderless zone created by the Schengen Agreements, the Schengen Area, currently consists of 26 European countries, covering a population of over 400 million people and an area of 4,312,099 square kilometres (1,664,911 sq mi).
Read more about Schengen Agreement: History
Famous quotes containing the word agreement:
“The doctrine of those who have denied that certainty could be attained at all, has some agreement with my way of proceeding at the first setting out; but they end in being infinitely separated and opposed. For the holders of that doctrine assert simply that nothing can be known; I also assert that not much can be known in nature by the way which is now in use. But then they go on to destroy the authority of the senses and understanding; whereas I proceed to devise helps for the same.”
—Francis Bacon (1560–1626)