Strange Procedure By The Spanish Consulate May Deprive Thousands Of Visa Applicants

BLS International, the accredited service provider for Spanish visas in Algeria, announced a new procedure, described as a strange and surprising step, that may exclude thousands of Algerians from obtaining a visa, due to an additional administrative requirement not previously in effect, related to old passports.

According to an official notice published by the center on its website, visa applicants belonging to the consular district of Algiers, which includes the central and eastern wilayas or provinces, are now required to submit copies of all pages of their old passports when submitting their applications.

BLS confirmed that this condition is mandatory, stating in the alert: “Applicants must submit a copy of all pages of the previous passport,” emphasizing the need to ensure the file is complete before the interview date, without any possibility of rectifying deficiencies later.

As is well known, old passports that expire are, in many cases, collected when renewed through biometric services at municipalities, as part of the process of obtaining a new passport, which makes thousands of citizens unable to keep them.

Moreover, most Algerians do not make copies of the pages of their old passports before submitting them, given that this procedure was not in effect at most foreign consulates accredited in Algeria, making the new condition difficult to implement and likely to exclude a significant number of visa applicants.

This procedure suggests that the Spanish authorities are seeking to impose strict tracking of applicants’ previous travel history, especially regarding visas they obtained in the past, while the process could be much simpler given the existence of identity data, as well as biometric data, recorded and stored by consular services with every visa application submitted to them.

Under this condition, the absence of any proof of previous visas, especially the last Spanish Schengen visa, may directly lead to the file being considered incomplete and automatically rejected.

The most important aspect of this decision is that it leaves no room for correction or completion of documents when submitting the file, as the service provider warned that any deficiency in documents “exposes the application to the possibility of rejection without the possibility of settlement at the counter”.

This procedure was not limited to the capital only, as it had been applied since February 1st of last year at the Oran center for specific categories, meaning that its generalization to other regions has become a reality.

In a related context, BLS urged visa applicants to book their appointments exclusively through its official website, confirming the availability of appointments under the “ALG4” category, and stressed not to resort to intermediaries or other external parties, in an attempt to curb the phenomenon of appointment brokering, which has become sold for exorbitant financial amounts.