At the behest of the organizing committee of the 2015 Milan World Expo, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs is petitioning to postpone the European Commission’s proposed new visa rule requiring Chinese nationals to provide fingerprints when applying for visa extension rule, originally scheduled to take effect on May 19, 2015.
Milan World Expo committee member Giuseppe Sala said the fingerprint requirement would severely delay the visa application approval time from the present three days to at least a month.
“Security is clearly the European Commission’s top priority, but the rule will make Italian visa applications extremely complicated for Chinese tourists and add to the workload of consular staff, naturally affecting the rate of visa applications,” Mr Sala said.
He added that the visa rule could adversely affect the number of Chinese visitors to the Milan World Expo, and it was an important market for Italy as China was a massive tourism market with 100 million nationals traveling abroad daily and millions of them visiting Europe to shop and sightsee in Italy.(Translation by David)
