Covid-19: RO to issue EU’s certificate for travel starting July

The EU digital certificate for travel will be available starting July 1. Those interested will be able to download it from a platform developed by the Special Telecommunications Service (STS), Andrei Baciu, the vice-president of the national committee coordinating the vaccination campaign CNCAV, announced.

“We are on track. The certificate is scheduled to launch on July 1 […]. We will have a platform where users can create an account and receive a link to download the certificate,” he explained.

The EU “Digital COVID Certificate” is meant to “facilitate safe free movement of citizens in the EU during the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Seven EU states - Bulgaria, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Croatia and Poland - have already started issuing such EU certificates, the EC announced on June 1.

The certificate is digital proof that a person has either been vaccinated against Covid-19, received a negative test result, or recovered from COVID-19.

The certificate is available either in digital or paper version. It will be shown at border points, and the QR code it contains will be scanned.

“To have a uniform approach at a European level [..] this European Covid certificate was created to facilitate travel between states, to limit the time we spend at border crossing points; on the other hand, we need to make sure that all certificates, the proof we show is truthful, this will be guaranteed by this European digital certificate regarding Covid,” Baciu said.

Asked whether Romania could issue the certificates earlier, he pointed to various factors that allowed other countries to do this, such as legislative variations or previous initiatives in member states with important tourism activity. “By July 1, Romania will have and implement this European digital certificate regarding Covid-19 so that we can have the transport facilities that this certificate guarantees,” he said, quoted by News.ro.

(Photo: Alain Rolland/© European Union 2021 EP Multimedia Center)