Fingerprinting at Heathrow, Gatwick and Manchester Airport from next month
09.03.08
Next month on mandatory fingerprinting will be introduced at three UK airports - Gatwick, Manchester and Heathrow’s Terminals 1 and 5. Passengers will have to be photographed at check-in and give four fingerprints on a pad at a special station before passing through security. The process will be repeated just before getting on the plane to ensure it is the same person boarding. Airport staff will also check the photograph against the person's face.
About four million domestic passengers expected to pass annually through Terminal 5, due to open on March 27, will pass through the process to ensure those boarding the aircraft are the same person as checked in. International passengers will not be fingerprinted, as they must show a passport when they check in and before they board their flight.
The rules on domestic flights have been in place at Gatwick since the start of February and will also apply to Heathrow's Terminal 1 and Manchester Airport later this year. The airports say that these biometric checks are necessary because domestic and international passengers are not segregated at these terminals. However, civil liberties campaigners have raised concerns about the possibility of security agencies trying to access personal data.
Dr Gus Hosein, of the London School of Economics, an expert on the impact on technology on civil liberties said: ‘There is no other country in the world that requires passengers travelling on internal flights to be fingerprinted. BAA says the fingerprint data will be destroyed, but the records travellers within the country will not be.’
But BAA said the move was necessary to stop criminals, terrorists and immigrants getting around border controls and that the scheme was decided after consultation with the Home Office. It also clarified that the biometric information would be destroyed after 24 hours and would not be passed on to the police. Without the biometric checks, the company says, potential criminals and illegal immigrants arriving on international flights could bypass border controls by swapping boarding passes with a domestic passenger.
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