Relevance

The majority of countries worldwide is already employing or planning to employ biometric technologies for nationwide identification projects. The need for biometrics is conditioned by enhanced security requirements for the countries' territories and borders.

The key tasks carried out by biometrics in the civil identification sphere are as follows:

• Reliably establishing/verifying the human identity based on distinct biometric identifiers;
• Effectively combating misuse of identification documents (counterfeiting, forgery, etc.);
• Fighting organized crime, terrorism, trafficking, smuggling, illegal immigration, and financial crimes;
• Protecting citizens' personal data and eliminating attempts to use lost and/or stolen identification documents;
• Ensuring a new level of comfort for law-abiding citizens crossing the country's borders;

Among the most popular internal identification documents to be enhanced with biometrics are as follows:

• Domestic passports and/or national ID-cards;
• Voter's, taxpayer's cards, social security, pension, healthcare cards and similar documents;
• Driver's licenses and professional IDs;
• Migrant cards issued to foreigners or stateless persons.

In the sphere of international migration, biometrics is good at supplementing the following documents:

• Foreign passports, diplomatic passports, seafarer's cards;
• Entrance and transit visas;
• Refugee cards that allow foreigners to exit and enter a country.

Project References

• Nigerian Harmonized ECOWAS Electronic Smart Passports (5.5 million passports) is a global pioneer in biometric passport projects;
• Biometric foreign passports in other parts of the world will be issued to citizens by the year 2010 according to UN and ICAO requirements;
• US-VISIT is a program designed to collect, maintain and share biometric information on selected foreign nationals entering and exiting the United States ;
• Biometrics entrance visas for Great Britain and the Schengen zone countries;
• Passports for Senegal (3 million passports) are one of the latest passport-related projects successfully implemented by BioLink.

BioLink offerings for governmental programs are as follows:

• BioLink AMIS, an automated multi-biometric information system
• BioLink U-Match, a fingerprint scanner;
• CrossMatch Verifier, a special fingerprint scanner;
• BioLink U-Match Mobile, a mobile identification terminal;
• BioTime, a biometric T&A and access control system .