Machine-readable passport ready for Pinoys in HK

HONG KONG - The Philippines' new, machine-readable passport may be issued to Filipinos in Hong Kong as early as this month or next, under a pilot-testing scheme planned by the Department of Foreign Affairs. According to assistant secretary for consular affairs Domingo D. Lucenario, the DFA is targeting "at most, two countries, where we have a lot of Filipinos" to be the pilot sites for issuing the new passport. He says the DFA is just waiting for the production of the passport to be "at a comfortable level" before it is distributed more widely among Filipinos. At the moment, the maroon-colored passport with a magnetic strip that contains security features as well as pertinent information about the holder is being made available only to two categories of applicants: the elderly and overseas Filipino workers. But DFA started issuing them to Filipino diplomats and other government executives as early as June 18, three months after the Supreme Court lifted an injunction against the passport issuance by the e-passport project's original contractor, BCA International Corp. Lucenario said the new passports will be a precursor to the more secure e-passports that will have an embedded chip containing the holders' biometric information. But as it is, the machine-readable passport already meets the requirements of the International Civil Aviation Organization, which has set an April 2010 deadline for compliance. Lucenario says that while security is a major concern, the new passport also allows the country to abandon an age-old technology and catch up with rest of the world. "It has already become a national embarrassment for us not to adopt a technology that has been around for the past 27 years," he said, before adding in jest, "Medyo delayed na tayo ng kaunti." He said 96% of the countries in the world already have machine readable passports, and that around 50 of these have the more advanced e-passports. "Even (war-torn) Iraq has MRPs," he said. The new passports are still priced at P500 each if acquired in the Philippines, and Lucenario says they will cost as they are now at various posts abroad when they are made available to overseas Filipinos. But the e-passports will have to cost more, he said, to cover the extra cost of production and distribution. Unlike the old passport, in which the name and the personal information of the holder are written down, the new passport has all this information in a luminous strip stuck to the first page of the document. Under an ultraviolet light, this information page reveals the security features that include the seal of the Republic of the Philippines. The picture itself contains the name of the holder and a so-called ghost picture. On the inner pages of the 44-page passport, images associated with the Philippines, such as the sampaguita flower, the Rizal monument, Mayon volcano, among others, will also be seen under UV light. Also included is a digital image of the holder's fingerprint. "We now capture digitally the applicant's fingerprint so personal appearance is required for all applicants, even those applying to renew their passports," said Lucenario. - The Sun, HK