Schengen Visas: No Appointments Possible for Moroccans before May 2020

Four more months will be needed in Morocco to make a simple appointment to apply for a visa to enter the European Union area. Indeed, on the website where applicants for a Schengen visa granted by the French embassy, via the private company it has delegated for this procedure, the reopening of the section devoted to making appointments online to apply for these visas, will not take place until May 2020.

This is essentially the response of the delegated company, TLS Contact, which is in charge of setting up appointments and then receiving the visa application files from the French Embassy. As far as the French consulates are concerned, including the one in Rabat, Moroccans applying for a first Schengen visa will also have to wait until May, as the appointments, which are limited in number, are only possible if there are free places left.

In four months’ time, once this appointment has been made, applicants will then be divided into three levels, depending on the nature of the processing required for their file.

The first level is for those applying for a Schengen visa for the first time, in which case, according to an informed source, there will be a very long waiting period, both for the allocation of the appointment and for the examination of their file.

As for those whose last visa “lasts between three and six months”, the time taken to process their files is “a little long”, according to this source.

But for the last category, the beneficiaries of a previous Schengen visa granted at a recent date, and whose period of validity was set at one year or more, the time to issue this visa is “very short”, according to the source.

Faced with the high number of requests for appointments that they have noted, French consular sources denounce the establishment in Morocco of informal networks, composed, these sources claim, of cybercafé managers who monopolize the making of appointments online and trade.

For these French consular sources, the establishment of cooperation between France and Morocco, at a judicial level, is clearly necessary in order to put an end to these problems, which punish many visa applicants.

Finally, it should be recalled that the French National Assembly sent a delegation to Morocco to investigate these problems, which prevent French consular services from granting Schengen visas in Morocco. Led by M’Jid El Guerrab, this parliamentary delegation began its mission last January and is expected to last several months.

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