The Saudi Gazette
MANILA
A PASSPORT crisis looms in the Philippines following an admission by the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) that the country’s supply of passports will last only up to June this year.
This was the disclosure made by Assistant Foreign Affairs Secretary Domingo Lucenario during a recent court hearing, Sen. Mar Roxas said Tuesday.
During the hearing, Lucenario said the passports may not be quickly replenished due to an existing court battle over a new, improved and more modern E-Passport program. It takes at least seven months for the Banko Sentral ng Pilipinas to deliver new passports, he said.
Worried about the problem, Roxas has appealed to the Supreme Court to immediately act on an urgent petition by the DFA to enable the government to jumpstart the modernization of the Philippine passport and prevent a looming passport crisis.
Considering that the Philippines still does not have machine-readable passports, Filipinos may soon find it hard to enter the United States, European and other countries using passport scanners, Roxas said.
“It is ironic that the Philippines has a brand new law against terrorism, but its passports are still primitive and unfit for new international travel standards,” he said.
“Outdated as our passports are compared to the rest of the world, what is worse is a looming crisis where none of the Filipino travelers can avail themselves either of a jurassic or modern Philippine passport. We shall then be in passport limbo,” Roxas said.
He said the Philippines is the only country in Asia without a modern passport, and is included on a short list of similarly passport-primitive countries. These are Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cyprus, Mauritania, Nepal, Chad, Togo, Tunisia and Guinee-Bissau.
“This list includes the world’s poorest African countries. For example, Chad is a conflict-ridden country, affected by drought and armed rebellion, with hundreds and thousands of Sudanese refugees crossing into their borders. What is our excuse?” he said.
“Once the supply of passports runs out, and unless there is a way to go around the legal skirmishes, the constitutional right to travel of thousands of Filipino travelers and our overseas Filipino workers could be seriously impaired,” he added.
The senator lamented the fact that the strictness of the Philippines’ anti-terror law is not mirrored in the integrity and efficiency of our systems.
“How ironic it is that while the international community lauded our anti-terror law, our OFWs and other Filipino travelers bearing such prehistoric passports have to suffer extraordinary scrutiny at all major international airports,” he said.
“The point here is if we are to address terrorism, it should not only be in making a law, but, more importantly, in improving and modernizing our law enforcement. We haven’t even made the computers of NBI to communicate with those of Immigration and other relevant agencies,” he added.
“This is one reason why I voted against the anti-terror law. We are crafting a law that reduces our rights and civil liberties, while other measures—modernizing our investigation, immigration and other systems and databases—could have been implemented instead,” he said.
Roxas said the need to have this Supreme Court case resolved favorably is immediate, also because the Philippines is one of the few remaining countries without passports that could help the government monitor terrorist movements.
Roxas appealed to the Supreme Court to act with dispatch on a pending petition filed before it by the DFA to prevent a possible passport crisis.
“This legal battle stands in the way of our national dignity with Filipino tourists and overseas workers having to suffer the embarrassment of extraordinary scrutiny in all major international airports because of our primitive passports. This legal battle is not just over an ordinary travel document, but about our dignity as Filipinos.”
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