On 1 July 2021 the Regulation on the EU Digital COVID Certificate started to apply across the EU. It includes three categories of EU citizens, their family members and third- country nationals legally staying or residing in the EU: those who have been vaccinated against COVID-19, those who have recovered from COVID-19 and those who can produce a negative test result. This blog post provides a brief introduction and key findings of my article “EU COVID Certificates: A Critical Analysis”, published here by the European Journal of Risk Regulation.

The article examines the main declared goals of the new Regulation – the first being that EU COVID Certificates facilitate safe cross-border movement, the second being that they preclude more restrictive national measures, the third being that they prevent discrimination and the fourth being that they coordinate Member States’ actions. In so doing, it highlights the main benefits and weaknesses of the Regulation, but it also goes beyond the Regulation by tackling broader questions of EU law that will be of relevance even once the pandemic is over and EU COVID certificates cease to exist. In this respect, the paper points to the difficulty in assessing the suitability of EU COVID certificates for facilitating safe free movement, particularly due to scientific uncertainties associated to the emergence of new variants and due to the different efficacies of various vaccines used in the EU and worldwide.

The paper also highlights that EU COVID certificates enable a more individualised risk assessment than the adoption of more general, systematic and restrictive national measures, as well as that they offer acceptable alternatives to vaccination certificates – in the form of a negative COVID-19 test and proof of recovery from COVID-19 – for the purpose of cross-border movement. It opens up the question of whether it is acceptable to restrict free movement more than is necessary to individuals who can prove that they do not pose a health threat to the others out of concerns of solidarity towards those who cannot do so. Finally, the paper identifies the effects that EU COVID certificates will have on Member States’ regulations of national COVID-19 certificates, notably those designed for other purposes than cross-border travel, and it shows that there is a thin line between the EU’s and national competences in this area. One could view this process as a projection of the EU’s influence and its coordinating role in issues that are seemingly outside the scope of EU law, as they are based on national public health rules and might have no cross-border element.

Prof. Dr. Iris Goldner Lang, LL.M. (LSE), is a Jean Monnet Professor of EU Law and the holder of the UNESCO Chair on Free Movement of People, Migration and Inter-Cultural Dialogue at the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Law.

Read “EU COVID-19 Certificates: A Critical Analysis” without charge until 1 October. The full symposium on COVID-19 Certificates, also freely available for a limited time, can be found here.