Children as young as six will have to have their fingerprints checked

[katty]

Child fingerprint checks at European borders
By Bruno Waterfield in Brussels Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 14/02/2008

more: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/main.jhtml?xml=/travel/2008/02/14/nfingerprint114.xml

Children as young as six will have to have their fingerprints checked in order to enter or exit the European Union, under radical proposals made by Brussels.

Bruno Waterfield: The dawning of a new EU surveillance era
By 2019 all travellers, including children, will be required to enter a closed booth on their own, where their biometric details, stored digitally on microchips in passports, will be checked against their real fingerprints.

Under the plans all non-EU citizens visiting will be fingerprinted upon entry

Tony Bunyan, of the Statewatch civil liberties group, believes that the next stage of pan-European moves to tighten frontier controls is "a bridge too far".

"The idea that visitors and possibly EU citizens - including children aged six and above - should enter an enclosed box and be told what to do by machines and for computers to decide whether to let us out or not is a quite appalling proposal," he said.