May 7, 2003	Wednesday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 4, 1424

PARIS, May 6: Despite a deep rift over Iraq, France and the United States agreed on Monday to work together on a hi-tech “passport of the future” as part of the international fight against terrorism and organized crime.

Police sources said the two states had agreed to jointly chair a working group of G8 states which will hammer out the technical norms for chip-driven identity papers of the future.

The meeting of justice and interior ministers from the world’s leading industrial nations was attended by US Attorney General John Ashcroft, the most senior Bush administration official to visit France since the two allies fell out over the United States-led war on Iraq, strenuously opposed by Paris.

But law enforcement, rather than transatlantic fence-mending, appeared to dominate the agenda.

Officials said the French-US-led group will seek to establish international norms for the futuristic identity documents, which will include a photograph of the bearer plus information on the eye’s iris and fingerprint details.

“They are going to think about what the passport of the future in the world will look like,” a police source said on the sidelines of the ministerial gathering.

G8 states Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United States and Russia want the chip-based system to make it difficult for criminals or terrorists to steal identities.

The problem of identity theft was highlighted in February when a British pensioner was detained in South Africa after being mistaken for a big-time fraudster hunted by the FBI.

While US officials say security cooperation with France has been excellent since the September 11, 2001, attacks, strains in the fight against terrorism remain.

Justice Minister Dominique Perben told French radio he would raise with Ashcroft the fate of six French nationals detained without trial for almost 18 months in a US-run camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The United States accuses the six and some 600 others of being unlawful combatants. Most were captured in Afghanistan during the US-led war against Al Qaeda and the former Taliban government, launched after the Sept 11 attacks.

Washington has refused to declare the detainees prisoners of war, leaving them in a legal limbo. Amnesty International has called for the prisoners to be charged or released.—Reuters