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I have a 4-year Schengen visa issued for tourist purposes. It is valid until the beginning of 2019. In addition to that, I have a 1-year residence permit from a Schengen member state (both a plastic card and a kind of sticker in the passport), which expires in a month. I planned to travel back home and spend a couple of weeks in Europe later this autumn based on the aforementioned tourist visa – just a normal vacation, not work/studies/etc.

Based on what people say here, there is nothing wrong with this, meaning that I can travel to, e.g., France if I still have a valid visa.

Meanwhile, I was told that as soon as I received that residence permit (the one which is soon to expire), my Schengen visa must have been revoked because "conditions for issuing are no longer met". And supposedly it has this revoked status in the VIS or SIS - the Schengen-wide computer system used at the borders. Something like this I found in this post.

This means that my Schengen visa is (probably?..) now void, while I can’t check this myself before leaving the country and trying to get into the Schengen area again, when a border officer says "It’s revoked, you’re flying back, bye-bye".

Any ideas about this supposition? It sounds rather strange, because other people seemingly had no problem with travelling with visas issued before their residence permits, but is it just luck/inattention of border officers? Even more confusing if I read the Schengen Border Code, Article 6:

… 2. For the purposes of implementing paragraph 1, the date of entry shall be considered as the first day of stay on the territory of the Member States and the date of exit shall be considered as the last day of stay on the territory of the Member States. Periods of stay authorised under a residence permit or a long-stay visa shall not be taken into account in the calculation of the duration of stay on the territory of the Member States.

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  • Why do you find Article 6 confusing? It doesn't have much relevance to the question at hand.
    – phoog
    Jun 15, 2018 at 2:55
  • I mean that Article 6 says that the stay authorized under residence permit is not counted towards 90/180 days. Which implies that one can also stay based on a short-stay visa. Probably, issued before the permit, too?..
    – Marcus
    Jun 15, 2018 at 13:06
  • Yes, Article 6 implies that you can use a valid short-stay visa immediately after a stay authorized by a long-stay visa or residence permit. But it doesn't address the question of whether a short-stay visa remains valid after the issuance of a long-stay visa or residence permit; the short-stay visa in question could be newly issued after the residence permit expires, or in the last three months of its validity.
    – phoog
    Jun 15, 2018 at 14:38

1 Answer 1

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You probably ought to look at Article 34 of the Schengen Visa Code. This indicates that you must be informed if your visa is annulled or revoked, and the visa must be stamped and crossed out.

Article 34

Annulment and revocation

  1. A visa shall be annulled where it becomes evident that the conditions for issuing it were not met at the time when it was issued, in particular if there are serious grounds for believing that the visa was fraudulently obtained. A visa shall in principle be annulled by the competent authorities of the Member State which issued it. A visa may be annulled by the competent authorities of another Member State, in which case the authorities of the Member State that issued the visa shall be informed of such annulment.
  2. A visa shall be revoked where it becomes evident that the conditions for issuing it are no longer met. A visa shall in principle be revoked by the competent authorities of the Member State which issued it. A visa may be revoked by the competent authorities of another Member State, in which case the authorities of the Member State that issued the visa shall be informed of such revocation.
  3. A visa may be revoked at the request of the visa holder. The competent authorities of the Member States that issued the visa shall be informed of such revocation.
  4. Failure of the visa holder to produce, at the border, one or more of the supporting documents referred to in Article 14(3), shall not automatically lead to a decision to annul or revoke the visa.
  5. If a visa is annulled or revoked, a stamp stating ‘ANNULLED’ or ‘REVOKED’ shall be affixed to it and the optically variable feature of the visa sticker, the security feature ‘latent image effect’ as well as the term ‘visa’ shall be invalidated by being crossed out.
  6. A decision on annulment or revocation of a visa and the reasons on which it is based shall be notified to the applicant by means of the standard form set out in Annex VI.
  7. A visa holder whose visa has been annulled or revoked shall have the right to appeal, unless the visa was revoked at his request in accordance with paragraph 3. Appeals shall be conducted against the Member State that has taken the decision on the annulment or revocation and in accordance with the national law of that Member State. Member States shall provide applicants with information regarding the procedure to be followed in the event of an appeal, as specified in Annex VI.
  8. Information on an annulled or a revoked visa shall be entered into the VIS in accordance with Article 13 of the VIS Regulation.

Since (I assume) you were not informed of the visa's revocation, and the visa has not been stamped or crossed out, you can conclude that the visa remains valid.

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  • No, I wasn’t informed, neither when crossing the border control nor by mail. But is this a “strong” (and really implemented) requirement that a holder should be informed? I guess they can just revoke the visa in their IT system, and that’s it. Even if they did send me a letter, it could have been lost by the post service.
    – Marcus
    Jun 15, 2018 at 13:07
  • @Marcus if some reason to revoke the visa arises while the visa and you are not available, they'll put an alert into the database. The next time you try to use the visa, the officer will stop you and revoke the visa. When they issued your residence permit, your visa was available, because it was (I assume) in the same passport where they placed the sticker for your residence permit. If the residence permit had invalidated the existing visa, they would have physically cancelled the existing visa at that point. They didn't.
    – phoog
    Jun 15, 2018 at 14:35
  • Great, many thanks for your comments! I’ll hope this was not their mistake/inattention/laziness/etc. but the visa really remained valid.
    – Marcus
    Jun 17, 2018 at 22:03

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