Child fingerprinting spreads further
Monday, March 5th, 2007The Sunday Times reports that children as young as 11 are to be fingerprinted for passports:
Leaked Home Office plans show that the mass fingerprinting will start in 2010, with a batch of 295,000 youngsters who apply for passports.
The Home Office expects 545,000 children aged 11 and over to have their prints taken in 2011, with the figure settling at an annual 495,000 from 2014. Their fingerprints will be held on a database also used by the Immigration and Nationality Directorate to store the fingerprints of hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers.
But this isn’t the first foray into mass fingerprinting of children. At least 3000 schools are taking fingerprints from children as young as three, usually without parental consent or guidelines for protecting the data. Leave Them Kids Alone is running a campaign to end this, together with the Lib Dem Education team.
But the UK also systematically takes fingerprints from asylum seekers from the age of 5 upwards - they report “no problems” doing so in this EU report. And they’ve trialled taking fingerprints from under-5s, just in case those asylum toddlers go out on the rampage, I suppose.
