Nine EU States Delay EES Border Checks, and the Eastern Frontier Waits

Nine European Union countries have asked Brussels for more time to implement the Entry/Exit System, the biometric border regime that was meant to replace passport stamping for non-EU visitors, the Guardian reported this week. France, Greece, Portugal and Italy are among the states seeking the delay, with holiday hotspots citing the difficulty of installing the new equipment in busy airports during peak season.

The EES is designed to register the fingerprints and facial images of short-stay travellers from outside the bloc, replacing the manual stamping of passports. Its rollout has already been postponed more than once, and the latest request pushes a system that was supposed to be running across the Schengen area into further uncertainty.

For Italy, the delay is not only an airport matter. The country's land frontier runs through the Alps and along the eastern edge of the Schengen area, where road and rail crossings carry a steady flow of non-EU travellers.