Deal set to be struck on fingerprints

Date: 04/03/1999

By Gareth Harding

EU INTERIOR ministers are expected to strike a deal on how to fingerprint illegal immigrants next week after more than two years of heated discussions.

The agreement will be a feather in the cap for Germany, which has been pushing for EU-wide measures to curb the number of 'aliens' entering its territory during its presidency of the Union.

However, it has only been reached by watering down the original proposal and couching the protocol's provisions in deliberately vague language. "The text is not very beautiful," said one diplomat. "Everyone can read into it what they want."

Ministers endorsed the Eurodac Convention, which sets up a computerised system for comparing asylum-seekers' fingerprints, in December. But they failed to agree a separate protocol to extend finger-printing to illegal immigrants.

Whilst Germany, Austria and the Netherlands have championed the idea, countries such as Spain, France, Portugal and Greece have traditionally been lukewarm.

Bonn has stitched together a carefully crafted compromise to break the deadlock, which divides illegal immigrants into two categories.

Member states would be obliged to take the fingerprints of all illegal immigrants over 14 caught entering the EU. These data would then have to be sent to Brussels where they would be stored for two years or until the alien had been granted a residence permit.

It would, however, be left to national authorities to decide whether to take similar action against those stopped within their territory. If they sent the fingerprints to the European Commission, they could only be used for comparison with existing data and would have to be destroyed afterwards.