Nine EU States Push Back the Border-System Switch Again

Nine European Union countries have secured another delay to the bloc's Entry/Exit System, the automated border regime meant to replace passport stamping for non-EU visitors, according to the Guardian. France, Greece, Portugal and Italy are among the states that asked for more time, the paper reported, arguing that their busiest airports and ports cannot absorb the change without queues. The EES records a traveller's entry and exit electronically and was designed to tighten control of the Schengen short-stay clock.

The request is framed around capacity, not principle. Holiday hotspots, as the Guardian describes them, say the biometric enrolment that the system requires at first crossing is slow at a check-in desk, slower still at a vehicle lane, and hardest of all where passengers arrive in a surge from a single aircraft or a single ferry.

For Genoa and the Ligurian coast the arithmetic is familiar. The region's gateways are not one big airport but a scatter of them — Genoa's city airport, the ferry terminals that feed Sardinia, Corsica and Sicily, and the cruise berths that empty thousands of people onto the quay in a morning. A border regime built around a steady trickle of individual travellers strains hardest at exactly those points where arrivals come in blocks.