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PARIS, Nov 24: French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy has said that Europe will have its computerized fingerprint data bank by January 2003, that should cut down considerably the number of political asylum seekers in the European Union countries.
The data bank — codenamed Eurodac — will contain the fingerprints of persons who apply for political asylum in the EU countries. Mr Sarkozy said that a circular defining the system and setting the date for its introduction should be published imminently.
Largely the brainchild of Mr Sarkozy, Eurodac’s principal purpose is to stop the entry into one European country of an asylum-seeker who has been turned down in another. Indeed, it will attempt to dissuade seekers from filing simultaneously requests for political asylum in several EU countries.
FRENCH POLICE: The French police’s own in-house investigative branch — the IGPN — has determined that their local representatives at Sangatte were not responsible for setting a fire early Friday morning (Nov 22) that burned down a former German blockhaus being used by DPs who had been forced to seek exile there after having been summarily removed from nearby Calais the previous week.
French police had been accused on Friday by a local pro-DP association of having deliberately set fire to a shelter used at Sangatte by DPs who were attempting to survive the rough local weather after their evacuation on Nov 14 from Saints Peter and Paul church.
The fire, which destroyed the personal belongings of the DPs who were living in the structure, was used as a reason by the police to round up the DPs to take them elsewhere outside of the area, and thus away from the scrutiny of the international press that had recently gathered at Calais and Sangatte.
The local governmental representative Cyrille Schott, who is the Prefect for the Pas-de-Calais department, had already indicated on Friday that as far as he was concerned, the deflagration was accidental, having been ignited by a candle left by the immigrants. Now that the IGPN has issued its determination that local police had nothing to do with the fire, Mr Schott says that he is considering suing the association making the claims for defamation.
According to the testimony that the association had begun to make public on Friday and Saturday, the police were said to have been observed by eyewitnesses to have emptied in the shelter a container filled with an inflammable liquid, then set it on fire with a cigarette lighter.
The police had just rounded up several men who had sought shelter in the structure — a blockhaus built by German soldiers in 1940 at the start of the Nazi occupation of France — and this after having been forced to flee neighbouring Calais where police on Nov 14 and 15 had been ordered to round up all refugees, those within Saints Peter and Paul Church, but also those outside who continued to attract press attention.
