Biometric Best Practices Key to EU Action Plan on Travel Documents

The European Commission has announced a new Action Plan to improve the security of European travel documents.

Among the key recommendations is the exchange of best practices with respect to biometric enrollment – an increasingly popular means of identification as Europe continues to struggle to manage an influx of migrants and refugees. Such exchanges will be facilitated by workshops the Commission will organize next year.

Other key recommendations include the consideration of new means of unmasking false identities at the point of registration; the adoption of uniform visa and residency documents; and the registration of all discovered fraudulent, lost, and stolen documents to centralized Schengen and INTERPOL databases.

EU members will have the next year to follow through on the Action Plan’s guidelines, with the European Commission scheduled to deliver an assessment of their success to the European Parliament by the end of the first quarter of 2018. Action Plan recommendations aside, there is already a growing trend of adoption of biometric identification and security solutions among EU members, so substantial success on that front appears likely.

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December 19, 2016 – by Alex Perala