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The European Union has demanded Italy to obtain fingerprints from all refugees arriving in the country, even if it has to do so forcefully.

This move comes on the backdrop of EU accusations that Italy is not doing enough to make sure every migrant that gets off a boat in the Mediterranean, south of Italy is fully identified. The commission said on Tuesday that Italy needs to develop “a more solid legal framework” to allow for “the use of force for fingerprinting.”

“The target of a 100 percent fingerprinting rate for arriving migrants needs to be achieved without delay,” it said, adding that the county has to “include provisions on longer term retention for those migrants that resist fingerprinting.”

More than 924,140 refugees have reached Europe’s shores so far this year while more than 3,670 people have either died or gone missing in their perilous journey to the continent, says the recent statistics released by the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

Last week, Europe announced it was opening proceedings against Italy, Greece, Malta, and Croatia for failing to fingerprint migrants upon arrival.

This October, the European Union agreed to relocate 40 thousand refugees in Italy and Greece to other European countries, with the condition, though, that Italy start identifying everyone it rescued.

The Commission criticized the slow progress made by Rome in setting up six so-called “hotspots”, identification facilities where genuine refugees from countries such as Syria could be distinguished from economic migrants, for instance from sub-Saharan Africa, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Also on Tuesday, the commission said it was to propose a new military force consisting of at least 1,500 armed troops aimed at slowing the record influx of refugees. An EU summit on Thursday is to discuss the controversial plan for the force, which could even intervene in member states without their consent.

“In urgent situations, the Agency must be able to step in to ensure that action is taken on the ground even where there is no request for assistance from the Member State concerned or where that Member State considers that there is no need for additional intervention,” said a draft of the proposal according to AFP.

The plan also stipulates that the EU could send in teams of guards in case of a surge at a particular border, or where a member state has a “deficiency” in the management of its borders and fails to respond to warnings from Brussels, the de facto capital of the EU.

Italy’s Interior Minister Angelino Alfano says his country should be thanked, not threatened, for saving hundreds of thousands of people. He insists that close to one hundred percent of migrants who arrive here are finger printed.

At the time a few European leaders support an open-door refugee policy, others prefer controlling the external borders of the EU, deporting more people and paying third countries to keep asylum seekers on their soil.

On a related note, leaders of several Balkan countries have repeatedly threatened to shut their borders if their northern European Union neighbors refuse to accept refugees.

Balkan leaders say their states would not become a "buffer zone" for the tens of thousands of newly-arriving refugees. They have already started mobilizing hundreds of forces to their borders to stop trespassing refugees amid ongoing measures elsewhere across Europe to counter the influx.