Police Reform

Will be old passports invalid from 24 November 2015?

The roundtable on enhancing integrated travel documents control inTajikistanwas held on 29 August in the premises of the OSCE Office inTajikistan.

It involved the participation of relevant staff of the Consular Department of the MFA, Registration and Visa Department of the MIA, NCB Interpol of the MIA, Main Directorate of the Border Troops of the State Committee on National Security, the General Prosecutor’s Office and the members of the Police Reform Steering Group.

The roundtable covered the discussion of the project proposals on strengthening integrated passport control: “The OSCE-Interpol: Support to Interpol inKyrgyzstanandTajikistan” and “Strengthening Travel Document Security and Identity Management inTajikistan.”

The Deputy Head of OSCE Office inTajikistan, Mr. Hans-Peter Larsen, while opening the roundtable, has noted, that “the OSCE Office inTajikistan, acting within the framework of its mandate, attaches a significant importance to issues of protection, simplification, and harmonization of travel documents issuance system inTajikistan.” Just because, the OSCE has chaired a tripartite activity of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), International Organization of Civic Aviation (ICAO), and International Organization on Migration (IOM) on Strengthening Travel Documents Security and Identity Data Management in Tajikistan.” According to Mr. Larsen, the projects will be implementing in the frame of Memorandum of Understanding between the OSCE andTajikistanon police reform issues, which is a pillar of the OSCE Police Reform Program inTajikistan.

Christopher Hornek, Officer of the Antiterrorism Unit of the OSCE, presented the projects, who outlined that “projects are developed as per request of the Government of Tajikistan, and several researches, carried out from 4 to 9 October 2010 at 10 Border Control Points (BCPs) by the OSCE experts and the NCB Interpol of Tajikistan, preceded before the development of the projects. These BCPs were nominated by the Government of Tajikistan in September 2009, as well as the technical assessment of handling and issuance procedures of entry/exit travel documents and ID documents, confirming the identity of a person inTajikistan, implemented by the OSCE, ICAO and IOM in June-July of 2010.”

According to Mr. Hornek, just the results of studies and preliminary needs assessment of the Republic of Tajikistan on strengthening integrated passport control became the basis for drafting project proposals “OSCE-Interpol: Support to Interpol in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan,” and “Strengthening Travel Document Security and Identity Management System in Tajikistan,” which were sent to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Tajikistan in December 2010. Mr. Hornek has marked that the donors are found for the first project: the Government of Norway has agreed to allocate a special grant for its implementation, but due to absence of an official response from the Tajik side, thus the OSCE andTajikistandid not initiate the project implementation.

The same situation is with the second project. The technical assessment was carried out by the OSCE, ICAO, and IOM specialists in June-July of 2010, its conclusions and suggestions on improvement the issuance system of travel documents were already forwarded toTajikistanin December 2010. However, the Tajik side did not take any efficient measures to finalize the project documents and to conduct internal procedures for its implementation.

During the lively discussion, participants of the meeting adopted the recommendations, aimed to speed up solution of issues related to implementation of the mentioned projects, which will be sent to the Government of Tajikistan.

The comments of a specialist to the OSCE press-release 

Thus, there was a roundtable on strengthening integrated passport control inTajikistanon the 29 August 2012 in the premises of the OSCE Office inTajikistan. We will try to sort out the official information, and try to explain the information of the press-release in a clear manner, since the contents provided in a given form is understandable only to inside specialists.

Tajikistanis a member of the OSCE, IOM and ICAO. The membership in these organizations imposes certain commitments onTajikistan, which obliges our country to fulfill it.

Hence, the ICAO set a Standard in 2005, which regulates personal identification requirements. In accordance with the Standard, “The Agreeing States are obliged to include biometric data into their machine readable passports (MRP), visas, and other official travel documents, by using one or several optional technologies of data storing in addition to the machine readable area, with technical requirements to be set forth in the Doc 9303 “Machine Readable Travel Documents.” Meanwhile, “The Agreeing States commence issuing only machine readable passports in pursuant to technical requirements of the part 1, of the document Doc 9303 no later that 1 April 2010.”

Tajikistanhas partially fulfilled this requirement: since 1 April 2010 our country has started issuing of so-called biometric passport, which costs about 100USD, including the MFA service fees. However, we are still issuing such “non-machine readable passports” – the old international passports of 1998 model, which contradicts ICAO specifications. Moreover, the validity date of such passports is as before – 5 years. But the ICAO Standard requires the citizens of all ICAO member-countries that after 24 November 2015 compulsory availability of only machine readable passports at international flights after.

I.e. if I obtain a regular international document on 5 September 2012 with an expiration date as of 5 September 2017, I would not be able to leave outsideTajikistanafter 24 November 2015.

The same way majority citizens ofTajikistan, whose only source for their family maintenance is traveling abroad for labor migration, would not be able to fly abroad.

The validity date of a biometric passport is 10 years, and even though its apparent high cost, it seems that for our compatriots it would be more beneficial to obtain just such biometric passport. Needless to mention about waiting in queues, the cost of two regular international passports anyway will be high enough for an average citizen. However, people are not in a hurry to get biometric passports, most likely hoping on the off chance: starting from 1 April 2010 approximately 27,000 biometric passports were issued across Tajikistan, while annually, over 600,000 citizens of Tajikistan depart only to the Russian Federation.

Certainly, an unawareness of citizens concerning the fact that starting from 24 November 2015, people might face serious impediments to travel abroad plays a certain role. Our citizens simply unaware, that they will not be able to departTajikistanafter the indicated date without a biometric passport. Either they hope that the Government of Tajikistan will negotiate withRussiato prolong the expiration date of old type passports for 5-6 more years.

The accessibility to data collection centers for issuing biometric passports is of no small importance for task solution of machine readable passports issuance. There are overall 5 centers inTajikistan: 2 inDushanbe, 1 of each in Khujand, Kurgan-Tyube and Khorog. There are also other circumstances, which also prevent to some extent the launch of a broad campaign on issuing biometric passports, and first of all, the above-mentioned high cost of it.

For this purpose, the ICAO has developed an action plan called “Universal Introduction of Machine Readable Documents” for the countries, which keep issuing non-machine readable passports due to lack of financial resources. This plan involves a technical assistance in the application of ICAO requirements and in arrangement of the issuance system, the identification of resources in state-donors and international financial agencies, the project management through the Directorate of Technical Cooperation of ICAO and quality control.

Under the aegis of this action plan, the ICAO in cooperation with the OSCE and IOM have started the development of a long-term program on integration of machine readable travel documents in Tajikistan, or simply, of biometric passports. The specialists of three international organizations have visited Tajikistan several times to learn technical and other needs of Tajikistan, and taking into consideration the signed MOU on Police Reform between the OSCE and Tajikistan, it was decided to implement the project proposals within the framework of police reform in Tajikistan.

Why was such kind of decision made?

The decision was made, because in both project documents the main work load on their implementation lays on the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Firstly, the project “Strengthening of Travel Document Security and Identity Management inTajikistan” envisages creation of 12 more Centers on collecting data for issuing biometric passports inTajikistan. Secondly, the project expects a conduction of the strong information campaign on awareness rising of citizens ofTajikistan, i.e. us, on necessity of using biometric passports. But most importantly, the OSCE jointly with the ICAO suggest introducing ID cards - electronic ones with biometric data, instead of internal passports inTajikistan. In the mean time, the OSCE takes upon commitments to search for donor countries for the implementation of such an ambitious project, with an overall budget of approximately €2.4 million.

It covers procurement of equipment for all passport issuing offices, which will issue new ID cards and creation of unified registering system of issuing travel documents, which will consolidate the databases of the MoJ Registration Unit of Marital Status, the MIA passport system and the MFA Consular Department. The system will interface with the system of registering those foreign citizens, enteringTajikistan, and will be installed on all BCPs at the border ofTajikistan.

The project proposals were developed by the OSCE, ICAO and IOM specialists back in 2010, however due to sloth of our state officials, they are still pending at the approval stage.

We wish the roundtable recommendations to be heard, so we could start implementation of these crucial projects for our country starting from 1 January 2013.