Can you help clear up my Brexit EU passport mess?
My passport was issued on 28 December 2012. It expires on 28 August 2023. On 28 December 2022, I was booked to fly on Ryanair from London Stansted to Milan Bergamo in Italy. Ryanair informed me at the airport that my passport was not valid after midnight. Fortunately, I was able to board my flight, but I was extremely upset. My travel document is a British
passport, issued by Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State and in the name of Her Majesty and requires that the bearer be allowed to pass freely, without let or hindrance. Does the word of Ryanair carry more weight than that? If one cannot rely on printed information on such an official document, what can one rely on?
Ann G
A My response to your tale is to breathe a huge sigh of relief on your behalf that you managed to avoid one of the many downsides of Brexit by the narrowest of margins.
Forget what your passport says on the front about being a European Union travel document: the UK erased all the rights that previously pertained to EU citizens and asked for your passport to have its validity reduced.
Your travel document must comply with two rules:
Day of arrival in the EU – no more than 10 years since issue.
Day of intended departure from the EU – at least three months remaining to expiry.
Your passport didn’t “expire” at midnight on 28 December 2022, but its validity for entering the European Union ended.
In your position, I would be sending the Ryanair staff at Stansted airport a box of chocolate for their kindness in allowing you to travel. They might, not unreasonably, have decided to err on the side of caution in case the Italian officials decided a passport on its actual 10th birthday is no longer acceptable.
Also, you had just 65 minutes before midnight after a scheduled landing – whereupon your passport would instantly become a useless travel document. There was also the risk that the flight could have been delayed, or even that the non-EU queue at the Milan airport would be so long that you would pass the “Cinderella moment” (I have waited over an hour in just such a line).
Once you were safely in Italy, you were entitled to stay for up to 90 days. Your passport won’t allow you to enter the EU now. But
for a destination such as Egypt or Turkey, your passport is comfortably valid until the end of February. And for the US or Australia, it lasts right up to the expiry date.
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