It is no longer a case of waving your EU passport (or ID card) at the desk on arrival at any EU airport and walking through. Now the document – and, by implication, thereby its holder – needs to be scrutinised before anybody can be admitted (or can leave).

If the movement of EU citizens is really free, I do not understand the need for EU passport checks. But since they are being made and (presumably) recorded, it (presumably) means that bureaucracy, somewhere, knows who is travelling where and when. Does it mean that identifiable ‘undesirables’ – maybe including known or suspected terrorists – have to be admitted regardless? Because if they can be stopped at the gate, their movement, as a citizen of a federation without borders, is not actually free. Nor is the EU any longer internally ‘borderless’.

And, at Luqa, where most of the departures, like most of the arrivals, seem to happen at the same time, it is a pain in the neck.

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