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Schengen Countries Accused of Mercilessly Refusing Schengen Visas With France & Spain Accounting For Half of Rejections in 2022

Source: Schengen news, 26/06/2023

Schengen visa applicants are more frustrated than ever with the increasing rejection rates, calling out on the Schengen countries to stop “mercilessly” refusing their applications.

Sharing their experiences on Twitter, several Schengen visa applicants have complained that their applications have been rejected unfairly, listing all the difficulties they have encountered to apply, SchengenVisaInfo.com reports.

“I am so sad and angry. I was invited to the Google IO event that will take place in Amsterdam on June 20. We wanted to go as a family and spend five days in the Netherlands. I applied for a Dutch visa on April 25. They waited until June 7 and refused,” a Twitter user called Selin Tunc wrote on June 8.

She further explained that she had been told to appeal within four weeks, but as the date of the event she was planning to attend was approaching, she decided it was not something worth doing.

According to a thread of tweets, the reason presented by the authorities for Tunc’s visa rejection, who is the spouse of an EU national, is that she had not submitted sufficient proof that she is married to her husband, and that there was not strong enough proof that they have a child together, as claimed by the applicant.

Yet, Tunc says that she had provided a marriage certificate, and the birth certificate of the child she has with her spouse, an EU national.

“Since I learned the result yesterday, my eyes are swollen from crying,” she further wrote.

Tunc is not the only one to experience such a visa rejection. Other applicants have also shared the reasons why they applications were rejected, calling the trend of rejecting visas “mercilessly” unfair.

Meagan Teutsch, a US resident, says her husband, an Indian software engineer at Zillow in Seattle with a Green Card had his Swiss Schengen Visa rejected under claims that “information submitted regarding the justification for the purposes and conditions for the intended stay was not reliable.”

“We provided our letters of invitation, hotels, flights, and everything else so it doesn’t make sense,” she says.

2022 Schengen Visa Statistics released last month show that in the same year, Schengen Member States rejected 17.9 per cent of the 7,572,755 applications for a Schengen visa filed worldwide.

The two countries with the highest number of rejected visas this year were France, with 408,876 rejected applications and Spain, with 227,712 rejected applications. The two were also the countries with the highest number of applications received and visas granted in 2022, followed by Germany.

In the past years, the rejection rates have increased from 8.2 per cent in 2017, to 9.6 per cent in 2018, 9.9 per cent in 2020, 13.6 per cent in 2020, reaching an all-time high of 17.9 per cent in 2022.

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