The EU Commission plans to store biometric data taken from visa applicants in the planned Visa Information System (VIS). This was decided as part of a proposed regulation, which was already due in late 2004, but was delayed until 7 January 2005. The delay seems to be due to technical problems with stacking multiple RFIDs on documents. The upcoming Luxembourg Presidency of the Council wrote a note on these technical difficulties on 22 December 2004.

The note mentions in particular collision problems arising when several RFID tags would be included in one passport. As a possible solution concerning visas, the note proposes to store the biometric data only in the VIS and not on an RFID sticker, and says a majority of EU member states delegations seems to be in favour of this second solution. Concerning residence permits, the Luxembourg Presidency proposes to issue separate cards, with the biometric data on an RFID chip, as is currently planned also for EU citizens' travel documents. This solution is, however, opposed by Germany, where residence permits are already being issued in the form of stickers.

The European Union's Council of Ministers has decided, during its meeting yesterday, Monday, 13 December, to treat 400 million EU subjects like criminals.

By the beginning of 2008, every EU citizen and resident - with the exception of people living on the British isles and possibly in Denmark - will be fingerprinted when applying for a passport or other travel document. This procedure will be introduced in addition to digitalised facial photographs, which will be taken of every applicant already by the middle of 2006.

The data will be stored on emmbedded chips in the documents. These so-called RFID chips can be read out remotely, and there is so far no reliable way of securing the information contained on them. The project to establish a database holding holding the biometric data of all EU citizens to whom a document containing a biometrics chip has been issued was dropped.

The UK government is pushing ahead with plans for a compulsory national ID card. The Identity Cards Bill was announced in the Queen's Speech, which sets out the government's legislative programme for the coming year, and introduced in the House of Commons on 29 November.

The Bill is virtually unchanged from a draft published for consultation earlier this year. Citizens will be issued with a card as they renew passports, but can also be ordered to attend an interview to be biometrically scanned and given a card. A National Identity Register will contain details of the names, current and previous addresses, place of birth, identifying characteristics, nationality and immigration status of every UK resident. Biometrics (planned to be fingerprints and iris scans) will be stored on the card and in the database. Details of every access made to the Register will be stored, revealing the times and places that online checks were made on the card and hence the location of its owner.

It is likely that the Council of European Justice and Home Affairs ministers will adopt a regulation tomorrow, on 3 December 2004, to fingerprint all EU citizens and residents, to take digital photographs of their faces and to store these data in a gigantic database of 450 million EU citizens. This will be the last step of a procedure that has exploited the democratic deficit of the European Union to an unheard extreme.

Today the European Parliament adopted the proposal but introduced a large number of limitations. MEPs voted to clearly limit the kinds of information to be stored on the passports, they voted against the storage of the data in a central database and in favour of giving Data Protection Authorities oversight over the whole process. But it is unlikely that the Council will take any of these amendments into consideration. Under the European Union's consultation procedure the Council can globally reject all of the Parliament's amendments. Though it is mandatory to at least look at the parliamentary suggestions, it will be almost impossible to do so in this case, since the Council plans to adopt its own plan tomorrow.

The Dutch presidency of the EU has launched a new 5 year programme for Justice and Home Affairs. The previous five year plan, the Tampere Programme, was launched under the Finnish presidency of the EU. The new 'Hague Programme' was discussed at the Brussels European Council on 4 and 5 November and will be presented by Dutch prime minister Jan-Peter Balkenende to the European Parliament tomorrow, 18 November 2004.

The programme focuses on the current tendency of considering illegal migration a 'cross-border problem', along with terrorism and organised crime. Making reference to the attacks on 11 September 2001 in the U.S., and on 11 March 2004 in Madrid, it states 'a new urgency' for the security of the EU and its member states.

The means by which the EU Council hopes to achieve this security have

On 25 October 2004 Members of the Europarliament Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) voted on a proposal from the Council of Ministers to include a biometric identifier in EU passports and visas of travellers with EU destinations. While the MEPs were discussing the technical implications and privacy guarantees, behind their back the Council replaced the proposal by a more extreme proposal to include 2 biometric identifiers, instead of just one.

According to the new Council proposal, member states have to include digitalised fingerprints and a face scan on the RFID chip embedded in the travel documents. Face scans will have to be included in travel documents 18 months after the Council regulations enter into force (Germany will already start issuing biometric passports at the end of 2005), fingerprints will follow 18 months later.

The European Commission, otherwise known as being in favour of taking rigorous action against infringers of Intellectual Property Rights, is an infringer itself. On its e-Government news site, the Brussels executive body published, on October 14, an Article about a biometrics hearing at the European Parliament that is almost entirely made up by snippets from another Article published in EDRI-gram more than a week earlier. While the Creative Commons License that the EDRI-gram Article is published under clearly allows "to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work, to make derivative works" and even "to make commercial use of the work", it states one condiditon:

The European Parliament's Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) will vote today in Strasbourg on two important reports on the introduction of biometric identifiers in EU travel documents. Both reports - on "Visas, residence permits: uniform format, photo, biometric identification" and on "Biometrics in EU citizens' passports" are shepherded by MEP Carlos Coelho, a member of the Conservative Group from Portugal.

But even while the Parliament is preparing to vote on the report, the European Council is dealing with a proposal that would make the Parliament's vote void, requiring all Member States to take fingerprints off all of their citizens applying for EU travel documents. The European Union's Justice and Home Affairs Ministers, who are meeting today in Luxembourg, are even discussing an extremist proposal from Britain and Germany to introduce iris scans as a third identifier that Member States may introduce if they chose to do so.