This Technical Specification primarily focuses on biometric aspects of portable verification and identification systems for law enforcement and border control authorities. The recommendations given here will balance the needs of security, ease of access and data protection. ISO/IEC has published a series of standards dealing with biometric data coding, interfaces, performance tests as well as compliance tests. It is essential for interoperability that all these standards are applied in European deployments. However, ISO/IEC standards do not consider national or regional characteristics; in particular, they do not consider European Union privacy and data protection regulation as well as accessibility and usability requirements. This Technical Specification extends the ISO standards by emphasizing specific European needs (for example EU data Protection Directive 95/46/EC and European databases access). The Technical Specification systematically discusses issues to be considered when planning, deploying and using portable identity verification systems and gives recommendations for those types of systems that are or will be in use in Europe. Communication, infrastructure scalability, and security aspects other than those related to biometrics are not considered. This document also does not consider hardware and security requirements of biometric equipment and does not recommend general identification procedures.