02/03/2004 (Agence Europe) - Since it came into service on 15 January 2003, the Eurodac system for the collection and identification of fingerprints of asylum seekers has allowed it to be determined that 7% of all requests had been made by people who had already submitted a request to another Member State, it was stated by Frank Paul, Head of the European Commission Unit that supervises the system. This corresponds to a little over 17,000 multiple requests, he said. Mr Paul, who was speaking on Tuesday at the hearing on biometric data organised at the European Parliament, assured that collecting such data was the only way to achieve this result. Out of all the multiple requests detected by the system, only one accusation would not have been justified. The aim of this system is above all to prevent one and the same person from registering asylum requests in several Member States. It should allow improved implementation of the Dublin Convention which determines which Member State is responsible for processing a request for asylum (EUROPE of 15 January 2003).