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Europeans agree on passports, differ on African camps

Interior ministers from the five largest western European states agreed to adopt the use of digital fingerprinting on passports, officials said, but a second day of talks yesterday found them still deadlocked on a controversial plan to create migrant holding centers in Africa.

Italian interior ministry officials said there was broad agreement on the introduction of digital fingerprinting and face recognition biometrics for all EU pass-ports to make them more difficult to forge.

Most of the groundwork for the digital passports was discussed at the last interior ministers meeting in Sheffield, England, in July. According to Italian officials, the measure would be in force "before the end of 2006."

Italian Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu is hosting his counterparts David Blunkett of Britain, Otto Schily of Germany, Dominique de Villepin of France and Jose Antonio Alonso of Spain at the talks. The ministers were to hold a press conference at the end of their talks yesterday.

But they remained deeply split over a controversial plan to create holding centers for Europe-bound migrants in Africa.

France and Spain are fiercely opposed to the plan, first mooted in August, and two working sessions on Sunday failed to placate their officials.

French sources said the participants were as far apart as ever on a joint German-Italian plan to create the centers in a bid to stem a seemingly unstoppable tide of immigration from North Africa.

France and Spain have meanwhile proposed "contact points" with the transit countries, mainly in North Africa, where requests for asylum in a third country could be examined.

But Paris rejected the idea of transit camps, fearing the proposed desert information centers "could become a sort of time-bomb for our countries," a French diplomatic source said.

Such camps would have "a perverse effect" and residents "would come to hate Europe," the source added.

Several ministers held bilateral talks on Sunday night and scheduled more for early yesterday in a bid to find a compromise.

Alonso said that Madrid "fears that these camps could become places where human rights would not be respected."

Human-rights organizations liken the idea to creating "concentration camps" in the desert.

"We doubt that the centers will be an obstacle to illegal immigration," Alonso said. "We have not found a solution to the fundamental points and those are: who ends up in these centers, who is looking for political asylum, who is fleeing poverty, who will run them? And what do the countries who must host [the centers] think?"
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