No contact between border police

Norway is the first Schengen country to open its border to Russia for non-visa travel for citizens living in a 30 kilometres zone from the border. The deal was signed last November by the two countries Foreign Ministers, Jonas Gahr Støre and Sergei Lavrov, and is supposed to enter force from early 2012.

Police Chief in Eastern Finnmark, Håkon Skulstad, is appointed head of a working group to see how the non-visa travel regime shall be implemented from the Norwegian side. He will deliver the intermediate suggestions in March this year.

How many meetings have you had with your local colleagues in Pechenga regarding the visa-free travel regime?

- The answer to that is none, says Skulstad to BarentsObserver.

Skulstad does not deny that there must be major changes in the contacts over the border.

It is the police that have the overall responsibility of the border control on the Norwegian side. Today, they have regular meetings with Russia’s FSB border guards and regional police in Murmansk, but that is not with local police in Pechenga, the area to be covered by local visa-freedom.

Also, there is no direct contact between the police at the Norwegian border check-point at Storskog and the Russian officials at the Borisoglebsk check-point, despite they are located only some few hundred meters from each other.

All official communications in case of trouble goes via the Border Commissioners.

Less local liberty to act
- The centralized cooperation between police authorities on Norwegian and Russian side has to find its regional counterpart, says head of the Norwegian Barents Secretariat Rune Rafaelsen.

He points to the rest of Europe where there are more and more direct cooperation between states on police matters all down to the local level.

- Unfortunate, we see that the local liberty to act among Russian police authorities disappears more and more. They have to await key decisions from Moscow, says Rafaelsen.

Facilitate non-visa travel
The suggestions from the Norwegian working group headed by Police Chief Håkon Skulstad will include needed infrastructure on the Norwegian border check point at Storskog, how to issue ID-permissions for border-zone inhabitants and ways to control the travellers within the 30-kilometres zone on the Norwegian side.

- We welcome the visa-free border travel. It can bring along a huge increase in the numbers of people crossing the border, says Håkon Skulstad. Last year, 140.000 people crossed the Norwegian-Russian border.

- With the development we see now, we might expect the number of people crossing the Russian-Norwegian border to reach 300,000 annually within a three year period, says Skulstad, underlining the importance of building new border check-point facilities.

Read also: Parliament wants 24h border opening

The zone from where the population can cross the border without valid visa includes the Norwegian town of Kirkenes and the two Russian towns of Nikel and Zapolyarny on the Kola Peninsula.

The border-zone visa-free agreement covers:

• 30 kilometers from the border into Norwegian territory. 30 to 50 kilometers from the border into Russian territory

• The ID-card can only be obtained by locals that have been living with postal address in the zone for more than 3 years.

• Only inhabitants with citizenship from Russia or a Schengen member state.

• The ID-card will be valid for three years.

• Applications for ID-card will be handled by the Russian consulate general in Kirkenes and the Norwegian consulate general in Murmansk.

• Application period will be 10 days.

• The ID-card will be followed by a fee of €20.

• A person holding the ID-card can stay up to 15 days within the zone on the other side of the border.

• People holding the ID-card will get their own lane with easier procedures at the border-crossing point.

Although this is the first agreement that open Schengen for Russians without visa, it is not the first time a Schengen-member state opens its border like this. Similar visa-freedom exists in the Carpathians border areas between Slovakia, Ukraine, Poland and Romania.