The European Commission on Tuesday demanded Italy use force if required to take the fingerprints of migrant arrivals after launching legal action against the country for its failure to register all newcomers in an EU-wide database, AFP reports.
Italy needed to develop "a more solid legal framework" to allow for "the use of force for fingerprinting and to include provisions on longer term retention for those migrants that resist fingerprinting", the commission said in a statement.
"The target of a 100 percent fingerprinting rate for arriving migrants needs to be achieved without delay," the statement added.