It’s a mistake that should never have happened. On April 10, 2026, the European EES and ETIAS systems were deployed at airports to improve the management of the external borders of the Schengen area by automating travelers’ identity checks, making them more reliable and efficient. For reference, the EES (Entry Exit System) concerns all nationals of non-member EU countries or those associated with the Schengen area who undertake short stays (up to 90 days within a 180-day period) on the territory of a Schengen member state.
However, since its implementation, this new device has already caused numerous difficulties for travelers, notably long queues. The reasons include airports not yet sufficiently equipped to accommodate this system, as well as several technical malfunctions. The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, recently admitted that it suffers from “unresolved technical problems and requires a lot of work”.
These are not the only problems since the deployment of this new system. In May, a British national attempting to join the United Kingdom from Cluj-Napoca, Romania, was accused of illegal stay in the Schengen area. The authorities reproached her for not properly recording her departure after a previous stay in Amsterdam, in April 2026. The problem? It was not she who had gone there, but her twin sister.
The system duped by the similarity of the two facial scans
Following this, the young woman was interrogated for about fifteen minutes by border officers. When she explained that she had a twin sister, they initially suspected that she had lent her passport to her sister, which was false. Her sister was in the United Kingdom at the time of the events and had never set foot in Romania. She was ultimately allowed to take the plane, but remains concerned about her future travels.
The EES confused the two women due to the similarity of their facial scans, but perhaps also because of their surnames, dates of birth, and nationalities, which constitute the only common points detected by the system. Conversely, their fingerprints, first names, and passports are different.
According to Niovi Vavoula, a lecturer in cyberpolicy at the University of Luxembourg, this unusual situation could be explained by a misrecorded departure for her twin sister during her Amsterdam stay, but also by insufficient checks by the Romanian authorities in Cluj. “This type of incident is very common and is corroborated by many testimonies”, she told the POLITICO media outlet.
The authorities pointed at after this malfunction
The traveler’s interrogation would also have suggested that “the Romanian authorities did not do their job properly”. “According to the briefing you sent me, it seems the authorities are not sufficiently trained to distinguish between the different processes and rely on facial images as the sole identification method”, Niovi Vavoula told the media outlet POLITICO.
She then added: “the fact that they did not verify passport information in the EES, nor take into account that the EES is still new and that it contains various problems, illustrates what is known as anchoring bias, which is the tendency to rely on the first piece of evidence and neglect the rest”. On the European Commission’s side, a spokesperson said that the Commission “does not comment on individual cases.” He did, however, specify that “Member States are responsible for the data recorded in the EES, to which the Commission has no access”.
He concluded by recalling that “if a traveler is concerned about how their data is handled, they have the right to request the rectification and augmentation of their personal data. In such a case, they can contact the competent authorities of the Member State, either at the border or by directly reaching out to those authorities”.
