Nine EU States Stall the EES Again, and Milan's Airports Breathe

Nine European Union countries have secured another delay to the EU's Entry/Exit System, the biometric border regime meant to register non-EU visitors as they cross the bloc's external frontier, according to the Guardian. France, Greece, Portugal and Italy are named among the states asking for more time to install the system at busy airports, the paper reported on Monday. The EES replaces passport stamping with facial and fingerprint capture for short-stay travellers from outside the EU, including British visitors.

The delay matters most where the traffic is heaviest, and Lombardy sits on one of Europe's busiest air corridors. Milan's Malpensa and Linate handle large volumes of non-EU arrivals, and the region's exporters depend on the same terminals for freight and business travel. A staggered rollout pushes the compliance cost — kiosks, staffing, queuing space — further into the future without removing it.