Nine EU States Delay New Border Checks as Sicily Waits at the Frontier

Nine European Union countries have secured further delay in implementing the Entry/Exit System, the biometric border regime intended to replace passport stamping for non-EU visitors, according to the Guardian. France, Greece, Portugal and Italy are among the states granted more time, with holiday hotspots arguing that busy airports need longer to install the equipment.

The EES is the European Union's long-planned answer to the manual stamping of passports, registering the fingerprints and facial images of short-stay travellers from outside the bloc and recording their entry and exit electronically. The Guardian reports that the latest postponement reflects the difficulty of fitting the new infrastructure into terminals that were not built for it.

For Sicily the question is not abstract. The island sits on the Mediterranean's central route, and its ports and airports handle both ordinary tourism and the arrivals that European migration policy treats as its external frontier. The Guardian's report concerns the travel and aviation side of the system, and does not address how the checks would operate at the points where irregular arrivals are processed.