Call: Schengen Masterlist Border-Control Pilot

The Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF) was set up to promote the efficient management of migration flows and the implementation, strengthening and development of a common Union approach to asylum and immigration. AMIF focuses specifically on the following objectives:

• Asylum
  • strengthening and developing the Common European Asylum System by ensuring that EU legislation in this field is efficiently and uniformly applied
• Legal migration and integration
  • supporting legal migration to EU States in line with the labour market needs and promoting the effective integration of non-EU nationals
• Return
  • enhancing fair and effective return strategies, which contribute to combating irregular migration, with an emphasis on sustainability and effectiveness of the return process
• Solidarity
  • making sure that EU States which are most affected by migration and asylum flows can count on solidarity from other EU States

Description and objective of the assistance to be provided:

• Enhance solidarity by ensuring consistency and complementarity with EU humanitarian assistance, by providing additional support to address emergency situations of heavy migratory pressure in Member States or third countries, or in the event of mass influx of displaced persons
• Support ad hoc humanitarian admission programmes aimed at allowing temporary stay on the territory of a Member State in the event of an urgent humanitarian crisis in third countries.

The present Call for Proposals aims at funding projects on the topic of a field experiment on the use and management of a Schengen Masterlist for border-control. The pilot for border-control is well defined in scope and implementation. Project applications must strictly follow the requirements and clearly indicate a detailed national implementation. The European Commission will provide participating authorities with a custom-built system (referred to as "the SW package") that automatically collects specific data elements from the passport (when read by the passport reader), anonymises these data and aggregates them locally to produce the required information for the CSCA validation. The SW package is subject to the signing of a loan-agreement allowing its use for 12 months.

The participating authority is expected to: 

1. Order the test system from the provider.
2. Organise the installation of this system inside a border-control booth at an international airport of their choice. 
3. Allocate the necessary staff for training and for using the parallel test system; 
4. Provide instructions to staff for reading eMRTDs on the parallel test system and for performing CSCA certificate validation when requested by the Commission and providing subsequent feedback to the Commission. 

In order to be eligible for a grant, the Applicant must be: 

1. a public body;
2. established in a Member State participating in the ISF Borders and Visa instrument
3. established in a Member State which complies with the following criteria:

• its authorities do not use a Masterlist (or a national trusted collection of certificates) for manual border-control purposes;
• the presence of ABC eGates in the chosen airport, actually working for EU citizens 
• the presence of Framework Contracts. Its authorities can rely on existing Framework contracts and/or service providers which can be contracted without the need for a National call for tender. 

The total budget earmarked for the co-financing of projects is estimated at 100 000 €

The EU grant is limited to a maximum co-funding rate of 95% of the total eligible costs of the action

Applications to this Call for Proposals have to be submitted electronically to the functional mailbox HOME-ISF@ec.europa.eu under the call reference HOME/2015/ISFB/AG/MAST. Applicants are strongly urged not to wait until the last day to apply. It is not possible to submit applications after the deadline.