Brussels – 22 July 2026. Consular directors from the 27 EU Member States gathered this morning at the Council’s Justus Lipsius building for the bi-annual Working Party on Consular Affairs (COCON). The Irish Council Presidency tabled a dense agenda focusing on lessons learned from the 2025 Middle-East evacuation, digital authentication of emergency travel documents and minimum service levels at outsourced visa-application centres. A core deliverable is a “Template for Joint Consular Contingency Frameworks”, intended to let embassies pool staff, transport and communications assets when large-scale crises leave EU nationals stranded abroad. Belgium, which coordinated last year’s Kabul bridge-flights on behalf of six smaller states, has pushed for language requiring reimbursable deployments of specialist B-FAST (Belgian First Aid & Support Team) personnel. The working party also examined an EEAS discussion paper on staff welfare—an area highlighted after Belgian and Dutch teams reported burnout during the Sudan evacuation. For business travellers and expatriates in Belgium, the meeting matters because it accelerates the move toward interchangeable consular services—meaning a German national resident in Antwerp, for example, could be evacuated on a Belgian-chartered aircraft and receive travel papers from a French field office. Multinational companies operating regional duty-of-care programmes will be able to reference a single EU crisis protocol instead of 27 national ones, simplifying vendor contracts for emergency assistance. The Presidency aims to obtain political endorsement of the contingency framework at the General Affairs Council in October, with an implementation pilot—likely involving the Benelux and Nordic states—scheduled for Q1 2027. Companies should update travel-risk policies and escalation charts to incorporate the new contact points that will be published on the Council website once the framework is adopted. Belgium’s Foreign Affairs Ministry confirmed that its “Travellers Online” registration portal will be upgraded to feed data directly into the EU Civil Protection Knowledge Network, allowing faster aggregation of passenger lists during emergencies. The upgrade will go live in December and will be mandatory for Belgian residents embarking on corporate travel outside the EU/EEA.
