In the face of the global threat of the Corona virus pandemic Belgium is waiting for certain Federal Government officials to decide on specific rules for people intending to travel abroad and outside the boundaries of Belgium. This was announced by Federal Mobility Minister Georges Gilkinet.
“It is no time to travel for leisure reasons,” Gilkinet said in a radio broadcast in respect of a select ministerial committee dedicated to fighting the spread of the new coronavirus and its variants.
Faced with the threat of new variants, especially the very serious British variant that have manifested in several areas in Belgium, travel abroad is “even more strongly discouraged,” while the situation is even “more dramatic” in neighboring countries, Gilkinet added.
According to him, “We cannot accept that some should undermine the effort made by all the others.”
“There is no European agreement to close the borders” between European countries, he stressed, however, recalling the ideal of freedom of movement and the fact that some people had to move for family or professional reasons the issue is therefore under consideration. It has not yet been imposed.
At the same time, Federal Health Minister Frank Vandenbroucke said that a ban on non-essential travel was not yet on the table, while the government might take further steps on advising against trips abroad, an or making conditions for such travels a bit strigent.
However, the Interior Minister Annelies Verlinden on the other hand sounded a note of warning while speaking on another Belgium radio air wave in the Flemish region said that closing Belgium’s borders is easier said than done, as it “lies at a crossroads in Europe,
“People move across borders to go to an essential shop or to see a doctor. For those journeys, it seems far-fetched to ask people for tests or to quarantine them each time,” she said.
“In the European context, we have agreed not to do this unilaterally,” Verlinden said. “We will have to look into this, but it is not the preferred route.”
This is made even more complicated by the fact that as Belgium is a member of the European Union, it is technically not allowed to decide to close its borders on its own, as previously reported.
