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Nearly 3,000 Georgian citizens have not returned to their homeland, taking advantage of the visa-free regime with the EU.

According to Georgian Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs Shalva Khutsishvili, 55,000 Georgian citizens have made use of the visa-free regime with the EU since 28 March 2017, of which nearly 3,000 have not so far returned to the country.

Khutsishvili also noted that in this stage it cannot be directly said that the citizens, who failed to return in due time, violated the requirement of 90-day stay in the EU countries without visa formulation, News Georgia reports.

In his words, after the expiration of the permissible period of the visa regime, part of the aforementioned citizens could have moved from the EU to other countries, with which Georgia also has a visa-free regime. The Deputy Minister stressed that the Ministry of Internal Affairs has identified all the citizens, who have not yet returned to the country despite the expiration of the period of the visa-free regime.

“Some of them might have moved to Ukraine, Belarus or Turkey. It cannot be definitely said that they violated the conditions of the visa-free regime, which relate to 90 days. However, we place these people in the potential risk group and conduct monitoring to find out which region they left from, who they are, what connections they have, what they might be interested in, etc.,” Khutsishvili said.

He also noted that the data of persons, who have not yet returned from EU, do not include the citizens, who use the land frontier.

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