The Schengen Agreement is a treaty signed on 14 June 1985 near the town of Schengen in Luxembourg, between five of the ten member states of the European Economic Community. It was supplemented by the Convention implementing the Schengen Agreement five years later. Together these treaties created Europe's borderless Schengen Area, which operates very much like a single state for international travel with external border controls for travellers travelling in and out of the area, but with no internal border controls.

The Schengen Agreements and the rules adopted under them were, for the EU members of the Agreement, entirely separate from the EU structures until the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty, which incorporated them into the mainstream of European Union law. The borderless zone created by the Schengen Agreements, the Schengen Area, currently consists of 26 European countries, covering a population of over 400 million people and an area of 4,312,099 square kilometres (1,664,911 sq mi).

Before 1914, it was possible to travel from Paris to Saint Petersburg without a passport. When the First World War came to an end, the practice of issuing passports and performing routine passport controls at national frontiers remained and became the norm in Europe until the implementation of the Schengen Area in 1985.

Nicole "Nikki" Sinclaire (born 26 July 1968 in London) is a European politician from the United Kingdom and is a current Member of the European Parliament for the West Midlands. She was elected MEP in June 2009 as a UK Independence Party candidate but had the UKIP whip withdrawn in 2010.

Educated at the University of Kent at Canterbury graduating with a Bachelor of Laws (LLB) qualification. Sinclaire has worked for Lloyds as a 'problem troubleshooter', was employed as a Gateway store manager and worked in Cyprus in the hospitality sector.^{[citation needed]}

Sinclaire held many positions within UKIP including Head Office Manager (1999–2001), member of the National Executive Committee (NEC) and Party Secretary under the leadership of Roger Knapman.

In 2001 she was disqualified from the NEC, shortly after being elected.^{[citation needed]} In 2003, representing herself, she took UKIP to the High Court, successfully overturning her disqualification.^{[citation needed]} In 2004 she became Party Secretary, a position which she left to become political assistant and advisor to Mike Nattrass, MEP for the West Midlands (2004–2009).^{[citation needed]}