EU citizen travelling with outdated passport?

May 3, 2013 8:57 AM

My 18-year old stepson is supposed to be travelling from France to the Netherlands tonight and he has just realized that his passport is one month past its expiry. He is a French citizen, but he can't find his ID card (eighteen) ... is there any way around this. Or is it one of those life lessons?
posted by bwonder2 to Travel & Transportation (9 answers total)

They may not even check his ID, depending on his mode of travel. I live in Switzerland and they are super lax about this at the French border. And if they do find out he may just get a 'go get it renewed as soon as possible, it is okay this time' talk. Though maybe the Dutch are more fastidious than the Swiss, who knows . . .
posted by thesnowyslaps at 9:02 AM on May 3, 2013

Both countries are in the Schengen region, ie an agreement to abolish border controls between the nations, so typically you would not get checks at this border.
posted by biffa at 9:05 AM on May 3, 2013 [1 favorite]

I doubt they'll check his passport. Schengen Agreement.
posted by jaguar at 9:05 AM on May 3, 2013

Call the passport police closest to where you are. Not sure about France, but elsewhere in Europe they can make temporary passports while you're waiting for an extra fee, provided you come along to verify his identity.
posted by springload at 9:07 AM on May 3, 2013

Is he flying or travelling by land?

(I have had to show ID to get on a plane within the Schengen Zone, but not to cross a land border.)
posted by hoyland at 9:07 AM on May 3, 2013

Best answer: Go for it. The probability that he will be checked is minuscule. If he has to show his passport, they will likely miss that it is recently expired, and if they notice, he will feign surprise and promises to take care of it at the next opportunity. That will be the end of it (they'll probably run a SIS query on him to make sure he's not a fugitive or something).

As a EU citizen (of white skin color) you can be pretty cavalier about this - I've traveled document-less between Austria, Switzerland, Germany and Italy a lot and never got into trouble.

On preview: Yeah, except air travel of course.
posted by themel at 9:07 AM on May 3, 2013

Response by poster: Great, thank you everyone. He's going to get a piece of paper from the police to say he lost his ID card so he'll have that as back up.
posted by bwonder2 at 9:09 AM on May 3, 2013

FWIW, I have never had my passport checked in 16 years of traveling intra-EU borders.

The paper ID thing from the police should be fine. (Otherwise yes, it's always a good idea to have ID, just as anywhere.)
posted by fraula at 11:33 AM on May 3, 2013

As others have said, he's traveling in the Schengen zone. Unless security has been stepped up significantly since my last trip from Paris to Amsterdam, a year ago, he won't be checked.

BTW, Switzerland is now in the Schengen zone. But even back in 1996, when I spent a couple weeks commuting between Colmar (France) and Basel (Switzerland) every day, passport checks were random. Sometimes there was no one staffing the border desk. Sometimes there was someone who glanced at my US passport as I walked past, but without even taking it from my hands. The only people the Swiss authorities really seemed to care about were the people with huge shopping bags, presumably Swiss nationals who had bought lots of cheap goods in France. On the French side there was usually no one.
posted by brianogilvie at 8:06 PM on May 3, 2013