Only three Schengen Area Member States are responsible for rejecting 66.5 per cent of the total number of short-term visas rejected in 2021.
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Out of the total 379,207 Schengen Visa applications rejected by the Member States, excluding Croatia which in 2021 wasn’t part of the Schengen yet, as many as 252,522 applications have been rejected by France, Germany and Spain, SchengenVisaInfo.com reports.
In fact, France has the largest share of rejected applications, after denying a visa to 128,672 applicants, out of the 652,331 applications its embassies worldwide received in the same year, or over 21 per cent of them.
This also makes France the EU country with the highest number of applications for short-term visas in 2021.
The second Schengen country with the highest number of rejected visa applications is Spain, which in 2021 received 483,469 applications in total, becoming the second country with the highest number of visa requests received.
Though Spain rejected a smaller share of the applications, 15.5 per cent, it is still the second country with the highest number of rejected visas, or as many as 69,863.
Third is listed Germany, which after receiving 346,284 applications, rejected 53,987 of them. Germany is also listed third in terms of the highest number of applications lodged at its embassies worldwide, Schengen Visa statistics reveal.
While these three countries have the highest number of rejected applications, the list changes when it comes to the Schengen countries that have rejected the highest shares of the applications they received. In this regard, the list goes as following:
- Sweden rejected 30.6 per cent of the 22,260 applications it received
- Norway rejected 26.2 per cent of the 9,895 applications it received
- France rejected 21.1 per cent of the 652,331 applications it received
- Denmark rejected 21.1 per cent of the 26,469 applications it received
- Belgium rejected 20.4 per cent of the 50,796 applications it received
This means that Sweden, Norway, France, Denmark, and Belgium were the most likely countries to reject a Schengen visa in 2021.
Whereas, regarding the countries that rejected the lowest number of visas, these are Luxembourg with only 29 (out of 2,383 applications received), Slovakia with 107 (out of 3,886) and Iceland with 259 (out of 2,735).
Regarding the lowest share of rejected applications, Luxembourg tops the list again with 1.2 per cent, followed by Slovakia with 2.7 per cent, and Lithuania with 2.8 per cent out of the applications rejected out of 24,764 processed.
In 2021, the number of Schengen visa applications filed at the Schengen embassies and consulates worldwide has plummeted by 83 per cent, compared to 2019, before the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic.
Moreover, the difference in the number of visa applications lodged in 2021 compared to 2019 is even deeper than the difference in the number of applications filed in the first year of the pandemic, 2020, and the year before, when 82.7 per cent fewer applications were lodged.