Nine EU States Delay Border Checks, and Naples Keeps Waiting

Nine European Union countries have been granted further time to bring in the bloc's new biometric border checks, the Guardian reported on Monday, with holiday hotspots including France, Greece, Portugal and Italy among those asking for leeway at busy airports. The delay concerns the Entry/Exit System (EES), the digital register meant to record the comings and goings of non-EU visitors with fingerprints and facial images. According to the Guardian, the governments involved pleaded for more time to implement the changes without choking their terminals at peak season.

The EES has been postponed repeatedly since it was first slated to go live, a pattern the foreign press has followed with growing scepticism. The Guardian's report frames the latest pause as a recognition that the infrastructure — kiosks, staffing, data links — is not yet equal to the traffic that flows through southern European gateways each summer. The countries named are precisely those whose economies lean hardest on arrivals from outside the bloc.

For Campania the question is not abstract. Naples and the wider region draw a large share of their foreign visitors through air and sea, and the port of Naples is a principal Mediterranean landing point for cruise traffic. A border regime that adds processing time per traveller lands first on the terminals that handle the most people in the fewest square metres, and those are the terminals the region has.