Klaus signs bill on new passports for next year

Passports bearing their holders' fingerprints will only be issued as of April 1, 2009, under a bill signed by Václav Klaus on Friday. Originally passports containing the data were to have been issued as of this May, but the EU has not yet approved technical guidelines. Fingerprints are to be included in passports under an EU directive from 2004. New Czech passports, featuring machine readable information and a chip with biometric data have been issued since September 1, 2006. The chip contains only a digital photograph for the time being.

Author: Jan Velinger