Passports of the European Union
Wikimedia list article

Passports issued by the 27 member states of the European Union follow a common design and confer the rights of EU citizenship on their holders. The EU itself does not issue ordinary passports.
The design includes a burgundy cover (recommended by the EU; all member states except Croatia follow this recommendation). The front is stamped in the official language(s) of the issuing country, and sometimes also in English and French, with the title "European Union". This is followed by the name of the member state, the state's coat of arms, the word "PASSPORT", and the biometric passport symbol at the bottom centre of the cover.
Some member states also issue non-EU passports to people who hold a nationality that does not grant EU citizenship, such as Danish nationals resident in the Faroe Islands.
Separately, the European Commission issues the European Union Laissez-Passer to members and certain officials of its institutions.
Use
With a valid passport, EU citizens are entitled to exercise the right of free movement (meaning they do not need a visa, a certain amount of money, or a certain reason to travel freely and no residence permit for settling) in the European Economic Area (European Union, Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway), Switzerland and, before 31 December 2020 in the United Kingdom.
The passports of EU citizens are not stamped when entering and leaving the Schengen Area.
When going through border controls to enter an aforementioned country, citizens possessing valid biometric passports are sometimes able to use automated gates instead of immigration counters.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Passports of the European Union” is wikimedia list article. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Passports, European and Union, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Passports of the European Union” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.