arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

Asylum seekers in Europe face a new hurdle from today, when the EU officially launches a centralised fingerprinting system operating from Brussels.
The European commission rejected civil liberties concerns about a "fortress Europe" policy and insisted that no information would be passed on to police or security services.

The €6.5m (£4.3m) Eurodac database would contain neither names nor personal details, apart from biometric data on fingerprints. This would be compared to data from those crossing borders in Europe.

Some 10-20% of the 400,000 people seeking asylum in the EU every year are estimated to be involved in so-called "asylum shopping" - seeking out the countries which offer the best conditions.

The Schengen system abolished border controls between most EU countries - Britain and Ireland apart. But from today, all applicants over the age of 14 will be fingerprinted at their point of entry into the union. Anyone crossing a border and found to have applied for asylum in another member state will be returned there.

Eurodac will be supervised by an independent watchdog. Fingerprints are to be stored for a maximum of 10 years and will be erased if an asylum seeker gains full citizenship.

But Tony Bunyan, of the London-based group Statewatch, said: "It is hard to see how people will be able to exercise their privacy rights. There are also concerns that some countries may extend the scope of fingerprinting."

They get fingerprinted since 1995. The Belgian gouvenrment saw a chance to get this decision enfored based on the excuse that a few asylumseekers using different ID's where registered in different OCMW/CPAS centers and collected several times the minimum income. Though most of the people using several identities were just incribed in one town or asylum centre, using their different id's to highten their chances of asylum, and most of them only ever use one ID, their own.
stime the measure taken is actually aimed at diminishing their chances for asylum. Remains simultaneous application for asylum in several countries, (applying is possible without actually being present in the coutrie you apply to), but now that every application can be checked within the Shengen countries, multiple appications might reduce the chance of an acceptance rather than enforece it.