A major technical fault struck Eurodac—the EU’s central fingerprint and biometrics database—just hours after the bloc’s revamped migration pact entered into force, Dutch immigration authorities confirmed. The failure slowed registrations across several Member States on Friday, overshadowing the celebratory ministerial meeting in Nicosia. Cypriot officials said arrivals at the island’s ports and airports were still being screened manually, but warned that sustained outages could create backlogs at the peak of the summer tourist season. Under the new rules, border authorities must register most irregular arrivals in Eurodac within seven days; without the system, carriers risk uncertainty over liability for transporting inadmissible passengers. Commission spokespeople played down the incident, calling it “normal teething problems”. Yet IT vendors told Global Mobility News that repeated downtime could trigger penalty clauses in service-level agreements signed by airports and visa-outsourcing companies. Corporate travel managers were advised to brief mobile staff on possible delays at Schengen entry points—including Larnaca and Pafos—through the weekend. The episode also fuelled criticism from NGOs that Member States are unprepared to implement the pact—a point earlier raised by Cyprus’s migration minister, who predicted it will take “at least a year” for the system to run smoothly.
Source: Reuters via StreetInsider
