Anger at plan to fingerprint EU refugees

Refugees and asylum seekers will be automatically fingerprinted under an immigration clampdown to be agreed by European justice and home affairs ministers in Birmingham today. Human rights groups are dismayed, Katherine Butler writes.

The sudden arrival in Italy this month of almost 2,000 Kurdish refugees from Iraq and Turkey prompted a panic reaction from EU governments. The 15 ministers will brush aside the criticisms of civil liberties and refugee associations to put in place a strategy for deterring any repeat of the Kurdish "influx".

A plan to be rubber-stamped today revives "Eurodac," a controversial fingerprints database which has hitherto failed to get beyond the drawing board of the committee of senior interior ministry officials which meets in Brussels each month.

Germany and Austria, which have been loudest in their complaints about the lax nature of Italian controls on the Kurdish refugees, now see Eurodac as the key to keeping asylum seekers off their territory. It will let them identify those refugees who apply for asylum in Italy but then take advantage of a 15-day breathing space to travel on to Germany where family members may already be living.

Identifying the member state where a refugee first arrives is central to the motivation behind Eurodac. If the authorities in one member state can prove that an asylum seeker first set foot in another "safe" country, then they do not have to deal with the asylum application.

Other features of the plan are training for airline check-in staff in spotting bogus identity documents and tougher sanctions on airlines that bring illegal immigrants into the EU.

At the heart of the strategy critics complain, is a determination to keep the Kurds from reaching the EU's external borders, rather than to investigate the abuses which have driven thousands from their homes.

"It is extremely disappointing," said Friso Roscam Abbing, of the European Council for Refugees and Exiles. "Out of the 47 points which make up this plan, 33 are about tightening controls and making it more difficult for the Kurds to enter."

That, the council says, flies in the face of the international commitment to admit asylum seekers and investigate their plight. Particularly alarming, Mr Abbing said, was that despite using rights abuses as a reason not to admit Turkey as an EU membership candidate, governments were happy to cooperate with it to stem the flow of potential victims.

In a letter to the British EU presidency, the council also accuses the member states of failing to develop a humane asylum policy and of operating the present system, known as the Dublin Convention, in such an inflexible way that its effect was to separate families and communities and maximise human misery.