FOLLOWING the 2014 inking of a contract with the Canadian Bank Note Company Limited, Government has been able to upgrade the security features of the Guyana Machine-readable Passports in an effort to safeguard the integrity of the document.

Home Affairs Minister Clement Rohee, at that Ministry’s annual end-of-year press conference on Tuesday last, said that, in 2013, efforts were underway to upgrade the Machine-readable Passport

Issuing and Border Control System, which was launched in July 2007.

He said: “This upgrade was facilitated during 2014 by the Canadian Bank Note Company with the decommissioning of the old system and installation of new hardware and software components.
This process is almost complete, and the new, re-designed passports will come into being in 2015, while the old passports will be gradually phased out.”

Expansion of passport issuance
Apart from upgrading of the passports and border control systems, 2014 also saw decentralization of passport issuance to Divisions B, E, F and G, thus bringing some measure of relief to citizens, some of whom had to expend significant sums of money to travel to the Central Passport and Immigration office in Georgetown to obtain their passports, Minister Rohee said.
At the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ annual end-of-year press conference in 2014, subject Minister Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett disclosed that she was urging Guyanese citizens to apply for their new Machine-readable Passports.

She noted that she was surprised and impressed at the response of the public after hearing about the initiative. “In 2013,” she said, “13,562 persons applied for their new passports, which shows that Guyanese are paying interest to what is being done across the country.”

Minister Birkett said she expects more persons to take interest in this initiative and get their new machine-readable passports as early as possible.

(Navendra Seoraj)