Nine EU States Delay New Border System, and Italy's Ports Wait

Nine European Union countries have secured another delay to the Entry/Exit System, the biometric border regime meant to register non-EU visitors as they cross into the bloc, according to the Guardian. France, Greece and Portugal are among those that asked Brussels for more time, arguing their busiest airports cannot yet absorb the new checks without queues. Italy is named in the Guardian's reporting among the countries where implementation has slipped.

The system replaces passport stamping with facial and fingerprint capture for short-stay visitors from outside the EU, including British travellers who until now moved through Schengen passport lanes with a stamp. Its rollout has already been postponed more than once, and the latest reprieve reflects a familiar problem: the deadline is European, but the staffing and the terminals are national.

The Guardian frames the delay around holiday hotspots and the airports that serve them. That framing is not incidental to Italy. The country's gateway airports — Rome's Fiumicino and Milan's Malpensa above all — carry the bulk of long-haul and intra-European traffic, and they are the points at which the new checks would first bite.