Ireland will exercise its Amsterdam Treaty right to opt in to new EU-wide procedures for fingerprinting all asylum-seekers, the Government has decided.
The move is aimed at closing loopholes which have allowed undocumented asylum-seekers to make multiple applications for asylum throughout the Union.
Ireland sought and secured with Britain a treaty protocol right to stand aside from EU co-operation in the fields of asylum and immigration and in the incorporation into the Amsterdam Treaty of the terms of the Schengen Treaty on passport-free travel. The idea was to protect the common travel area with Britain.
The decision yesterday to take part in the procedures of the Eurodac Convention is a signal by the Government to EU partners that Ireland wants to participate fully in the Tampere summit next week and shares the commitment of other member-states to creating a common EU-wide asylum system. The decision is likely to anger human rights groups.
Britain has yet to make a decision on whether to opt in, but is expected to do so as it has done with Ireland on large sections of Schengen's provisions.
Eurodac is an international convention agreed between the member-states, but under the terms of the Amsterdam Treaty it can now be turned into a fully-fledged EU regulation. The Minister for Justice, Mr O'Donoghue, will now write to the Finnish EU Presidency to indicate Ireland's willingness to participate in its implementation.
Eurodac is seen by interior ministries as an important ingredient in the fight to reduce fraudulent asylum-seeking because it makes it easier to implement the provisions of the Dublin Convention. This requires that all applications for asylum be considered in the EU state where the applicant first arrives in the EU.
Many new arrivals have sought to evade the provisions of the convention by slipping through their first port of call to other less demanding states where they insist that their documentation has been lost. A common database of fingerprints would allow cross-checking.
