No, Eurodac Was Not Created by the EU Migration Pact — It's Been Running Since 2003

The claim is that the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, adopted in May 2024, implemented a biometric database called Eurodac. The verdict is partially false. Eurodac is real, it is part of the Pact, and it does collect biometric data — but it is not new. Framing it as a fresh creation misrepresents over two decades of history.

Eurodac was established by EU regulation in 2000 and has been operational since 2003, according to the European Commission's own documentation. Its original purpose was to store fingerprints of asylum seekers to help determine which EU country was responsible for processing a claim. It predates the Migration Pact by more than 20 years.

The system was already expanded once before the Pact. A 2013 recast regulation, documented on EUR-Lex, broadened Eurodac's scope to cover irregular migrants, not just asylum seekers. Again, this was a standalone law with no connection to the 2024 Pact.

What the 2024 Pact actually does is reform Eurodac again — and the changes are substantial. The European Parliament and the Council of the EU both confirm that the reformed regulation adds facial images to the biometric data collected and lowers the age threshold for fingerprinting to six years old. Statewatch, which monitors EU security policy, notes this is a significant expansion of an existing system, adding new data categories and new groups of people. These are serious changes worth scrutiny — but they are reforms, not a new database appearing from nowhere.

This kind of misinformation spreads because the truth is genuinely complicated. The Pact does expand Eurodac in ways that raise real privacy concerns. But calling it a 'new implementation' makes it sound like a secret surveillance tool conjured overnight, which makes the story more alarming and shareable — and less accurate. When reading about EU migration policy, watch for language that presents reforms of long-standing systems as entirely new creations.