The European system Eurodac was declared operational on January 15th 2003. This system is aimed at facilitating the implementation of the Dublin Convention, which makes it possible to determine the State responsible for examining an asylum application by comparing fingerprints of asylum applicants and illegal immigrants.

The Eurodac member States have now to transmit to a central system tenprint records from asylum applicants and from others people who may have irregularly crossed borders or who are staying illegally in any of the signatory countries. Four States have already chosen a SAGEM solution to collect and transmit records to Eurodac and also to process the results sent by the central system. According to UNHCR figures for 2001, the four States connected by SAGEM, which are currently Germany, Austria and France and shortly the UK when it replaces an interim solution with a SAGEM solution, will transmit more than two-thirds of the data received by the central system. This will make SAGEM the leader in terms of connection to Eurodac.

SAGEM is able to provide its customers with an integrated solution able to process in parallel national searches and communications with Eurodac. It means the national data will be automatically duplicated and sent to Eurodac and the potential hit results from the central system will be analysed by the same operators on the same workstations. SAGEM solution allows a better, safer and more user friendly processing.

SAGEM solutions are modular. A first connection can be rapidly delivered: a system was installed in two months following notification of the contract in France. Further extensions are possible e.g. in the UK, the delivery of an identification document (the ARC) incorporating fingerprint data within a smart card was added to the initial MetaMorpho system which was already operational, in order to meet customers new requirements.

The confidence shown by these major customers attests to the flexibility of the technical solution provided across the range of our customised systems and bears testimony to SAGEM’s leading position in the biometric market place.

Groupe SAGEM is an internationally based high-technology group. The second largest French group in the field of telecommunications, the third European Company in electronics for defence and security and the world leader in fingerprint-based biometrics, SAGEM maintains a presence in more than 20 countries.