Huh. That’s really weird.
Ok, I dug at this a bit.
SBC says that all passports of all third country nationals are to be stamped, per Article 11. Exceptions listed in Article 11, sec 3:
(g) to the travel documents of nationals of third countries who present a
residence card provided for in Directive 2004/38/EC.
2004/38/EC is about the family members of EU citizens who are not themselves EU citizens (and thus have been issued a residence permit). So there is a class of people who carry a residence permit that don’t need to have their passport stamped.
There’s some other classes of cases. An interesting one is … if your passport is full. Then they give you a piece of paper with the stamp and tell you “don’t lose it”. excellent. Another is “if it would cause you political difficulties”. Same answer.
Well, so. Enter a EC report from 2009 that takes a huge survey of all of the border control agencies. Determinations:
- the passports of residence permit holders should have been being stamped - except of course for when they aren’t supposed to be being stamped
- a bunch of country’s border guards haven’t been doing it
- by the way - it’d be really nice if folks could be a little more careful about not stamping over other stamps so that the other agents elsewhere could read them, please
- it’s a mess
- why the hell are we doing this in the first place? the point of the stamp is to determine whether someone is overstaying - but how are we to know that a permit holder hasn’t just gone home and spent all their time in their home country, or where the heck they really were?
- there’s too many edge cases around that family member exception thing too
In the conclusions:
The Commission underlines that travel documents of third-country nationals who are
in possession of a valid residence permit of a Schengen Member State are exempted
from the stamping obligation on entry and exit.
But SBC itself hasn’t changed.
So… shrug
So now we have reports both ways - my experience, and Roger’s friend’s experience. I am curious about other people’s experiences now.
(acknowledgements to someone on stackexchange for pointing at the discrepancy.)