Nine EU States Push Back the Bloc's New Border Checks

Nine European Union countries have secured a further postponement of the Entry/Exit System, the biometric border regime intended to register non-EU visitors as they cross the bloc's external frontier, according to the Guardian. France, Greece, Portugal and Italy are among the states that asked for more time to bring the system into service at busy airports, the paper reported on Monday.

The EES replaces manual passport stamping with electronic registration of a traveller's face and fingerprints, and is designed to work alongside the European Travel Information and Authorisation System for visa-exempt visitors. Rolling it out has repeatedly slipped. Member states have cited the cost of installing automated kiosks and the risk of queues at peak periods, the Guardian noted.

The delay is procedural rather than political: the countries concerned are not seeking to abandon the system but to phase it in without choking the terminals that handle the bulk of their non-EU traffic. For a bloc that has spent a decade promising a hardened external border, the recurring postponements are an awkward admission that the infrastructure lags the ambition.