The Chief Executive, Mrs Carrie Lam, continued her visit to Beijing today (March 6).
      
     Accompanied by the Secretary for Constitutional and Mainland Affairs, Mr Patrick Nip, and the Director of the Chief Executive’s Office, Mr Chan Kwok-ki, she called on the Executive Vice President of the Chinese Academy of Governance, Mr Ma Jiantang, and visited the Hong Kong and Macao Training Center of the Academy in the morning.
      
     She said it was a pleasure to visit the Academy again and expressed her gratitude for its long-standing support for Hong Kong by providing training to civil servants of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) Government of various ranks. More than 1,000 people have received training in the Academy over the years. She said that Hong Kong is planning to establish a civil service college and that the Chief Secretary for Administration, Mr Matthew Cheung Kin-chung, and the Secretary for the Civil Service, Mr Joshua Law, have visited the Academy to learn more about its operation. Noting that the Central Government supports the integration of Hong Kong into the development of the country, she said it is of paramount importance to enhance the understanding of the nation’s latest developments among civil servants. She added that the HKSAR Government will continue to arrange for civil servants to train in the Academy and said she hopes to invite the Academy’s experts to Hong Kong to give lectures to benefit more civil servants.
      
     In the afternoon, Mrs Lam and the other officials met with the Party Secretary of Tsinghua University, Professor Chen Xu. She thanked the University for providing courses on state affairs for senior civil servants of the HKSAR Government over the past two decades with the participation of nearly 2,800 people to date. Noting that Tsinghua University, a world-renowned institution, has already established close co-operation with the universities in Hong Kong, she expressed the hope that tertiary institutions in both places could explore more collaboration in the fields of innovation and technology (I&T) and scientific research.
      
     Mrs Lam and the other officials then visited the Tsinghua University Science Park (TusPark) to see its excellent environment for innovation and entrepreneurship, and were briefed on TusPark’s latest operation and developments by the Deputy Party Secretary of Tsinghua University, Dr Li Yibing and the Chairman of Tsinghua Holdings Company Limited, Mr Xu Jinghong. Established in 1994, TusPark is now home to more than 1,500 high-tech enterprises, multinational research and development institutions, financial investment institutions and intermediary service agencies, and has achieved fruitful results in areas including regional innovation, provision of a co-operation platform for the industry, academia and research sector, transformation of scientific and technological achievements and incubation of start-ups. Mrs Lam said she was pleased to note that a co-operation agreement on the development of I&T enterprises was signed between the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation and TusPark a few years back to promote exchanges between young entrepreneurs in Hong Kong and the Mainland in innovation and entrepreneurship. Noting that the HKSAR Government is advancing the development of the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Innovation and Technology Park in the Lok Ma Chau Loop and is determined to develop an international centre for I&T in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Bay Area, she said she believes that co-operation between the two places is set to become closer.
      
     Mrs Lam and Mr Nip attended a dinner hosted by the Business and Professionals Alliance for Hong Kong in the evening. Mrs Lam will return to Hong Kong tomorrow morning (March 7).

The following is issued on behalf of the Hospital Authority:

     The spokesperson for North District Hospital made the following announcement today (March 6):
      
     An 89-year-old patient in a male medical ward was confirmed to be Vancomycin Resistant Enterococci (VRE) carrier on February 26. In accordance with the prevailing infection control guidelines, the hospital has screened patients who had contact with the index patient. Four more patients (aged 58 to 91) were confirmed to be VRE carriers without any symptoms of infection. Two patients have been discharged earlier while the remaining three patients are still hospitalised under isolation with stable condition.
      
     Admission and visiting to the affected wards have been suspended. The following enhanced infection control measures have already been adopted:
      
     1. Apply stringent contact precautions and enhance hand hygiene;
     2. Enhance attention to contamination-prone procedures; and
     3. Enhance cleansing and disinfection of the wards concerned.
      
     The cases have been reported to the Hospital Authority Head Office and the Centre for Health Protection for necessary follow-up. The hospital will continue to closely monitor the situation of the wards.

After a little less than two years of intense efforts, the eu-LISA Internal Security Systems Sector successfully launched the first phase of the SIS II AFIS platform. The platform enables the identification of a person from his/her fingerprints alone.  The introduction of a biometric search capability in SIS II was achieved by eu-LISA in tight cooperation with ten Member States who showed both interest and willingness to use biometric queries once deployed at the Central System level. Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and Slovenia will soon be followed by more Member States.

The aim of SIS II AFIS is to allow all the Member States to leverage on a centralized policing-oriented database. As such, it will strengthen the fight against crime within Europe which is a mission we should bear in mind each day. Using the platform to locate those who either lie about their identity or changed it to avoid detection is paramount to Europe’s security.

SIS II AFIS Phase One entered into operation on 5 March 2018 at 22:00 CET. The entire project was performed without any deviation from the timescale and in full compatibility with the requests from eu-LISA’s Governing Bodies.

“This is an important milestone in the evolution of SIS II. With its new biometric search capabilities the system becomes an even more important platform for law-enforcement cooperation and information exchange. At the same time, this is a great achievement for the Agency as a whole, demonstrating again our agility and ability to deliver towards the needs of eu-LISA’s stakeholders.” said Krum Garkov, Executive Director of eu-LISA.

Background

Articles 22 (c) of the SIS II Decision and the SIS II Regulation have foreseen an evolution towards the normal law enforcement practice of comparing a person’s fingerprints to the many sets of prints stored in SIS II (‘one-to-many’ search) to identify the person solely on the basis of his/her fingerprints.

However, this can only be achieved by using an Automatic Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS).

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e-mail: press@eulisa.europa.eu

for general information:

e-mail: info@eulisa.europa.eu