Brussels, 14/12/2004 (Agence Europe) - Within eighteen months, the Member States will have to issue their nationals with passports which include a photograph on a chip, and, within 36 months, they will also have to include digital fingerprints, stored on the same chip. Monday's Council adopted the regulation which brings in these provisions, on which the home affairs ministers reached political agreement at the end of October.
Biometric passports will be brought in in the 25 Member States of the EU, Norway and Iceland, plus Switzerland. Ireland and the United Kingdom, which are not part of the Schengen area, are not obliged to do so. They have, however, indicated their intentions of adopting the same biometric passports. The same is true for Denmark, which has six months to state whether it will adopt this regulation.
The adoption of biometric passports has been speeded up by pressure from the US, which threatened to remove the visa waiver for nationals of Member States without biometric passports. The American requirement, originally set for October 2004, has been postponed for one year. The Member States will still, however, miss the October 2005 deadline.
This new regulation does not affect the duration of validity of passports already issued.
In June, the Council reached an initial political agreement on which only the photograph was obligatory, and the digital fingerprints optional, at the Member States' discretion. In the meantime, Germany, France and Italy, amongst others, lobbied for both indicators to be obligatory.