To­day's Ed­i­to­r­i­al

?The com­mit­ment by Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Mar­tin Joseph to in­crease the speed with which the min­istry's Im­mi­gra­tion Di­vi­sion pro­duces and dis­trib­utes new ma­chine read­able pass­ports to cit­i­zens of T&T is sure­ly wel­come news.

Speak­ing at Thurs­day's post-Cab­i­net news con­fer­ence, Min­is­ter Joseph said Im­mi­gra­tion had re­duced the pro­cess­ing time from ap­pli­ca­tion to com­ple­tion of pass­ports from 54 days ini­tial­ly to 32 days. "At the end of the day, we'll reach a point where it will on­ly take ten days for ma­chine read­able pass­ports," said Mr Joseph, while avoid­ing ref­er­ence to ex­act­ly when the pub­lic could ex­pect ten-day pro­cess­ing of pass­ports. Min­is­ter Joseph al­so re­vealed at the news con­fer­ence that 60 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion now had these ma­chine read­able pass­ports. Pre­sum­ably, this means that 40 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion does not now have a ma­chine read­able pass­port. If this in­ter­pre­ta­tion of Min­is­ter Joseph's state­ment on Thurs­day is cor­rect, it would mean that there are still some 520,000 pass­ports that need to be processed and dis­trib­uted to cit­i­zens of this coun­try. Pro­cess­ing thou­sands of pass­ports over a short space of time up to a high stan­dard of se­cu­ri­ty is in­deed a daunt­ing task and it would have served the min­is­ter well if he had re­vealed how the Im­mi­gra­tion Di­vi­sion pro­posed to in­crease its de­liv­ery time so dra­mat­i­cal­ly.

Such in­for­ma­tion would let the pub­lic know whether Im­mi­gra­tion is re­al­ly up to the task of man­ag­ing this sec­ond wave of pass­port ap­pli­cants bet­ter than it man­aged the first wave dur­ing which thou­sands of cit­i­zens spent hours call­ing a con­stant­ly busy hot­line num­ber on­ly to be told, when they even­tu­al­ly got to speak to a hu­man be­ing, that their ap­point­ment was 18 months down the road. The min­istry's ini­tial prob­lem may have been an un­der­es­ti­ma­tion of the de­mand for the new ma­chine read­able pass­ports or an over­es­ti­ma­tion of the min­istry's ca­pac­i­ty to re­spond to such de­mand.

The de­liv­ery of pass­ports may have got bogged down in T&T's en­tire­ly pre­dictable bu­reau­crat­ic lethar­gy. In Ju­ly 2005, the In­ter­na­tion­al Civ­il Avi­a­tion Or­gan­i­sa­tion is­sued a news re­lease stat­ing that the or­gan­i­sa­tion's 188 con­tract­ing states agreed that all must be­gin is­su­ing ICAO-stan­dard ma­chine read­able pass­ports no lat­er than April 1, 2010. While T&T, as one of the 188 con­tract­ing states, would have giv­en its com­mit­ment to up­grade its pass­ports some­time be­fore Ju­ly 2005, it was not un­til 18 months lat­er, in Jan­u­ary 2007, that the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty held a cer­e­mo­ny to mark the com­mis­sion­ing of the ma­chine read­able pass­port sys­tem. At that cer­e­mo­ny, Min­is­ter Joseph pre­dict­ed that this coun­try "will up­grade to ma­chine read­able pass­ports by the end of De­cem­ber 2009," which is in one month's time.

Be­yond the in­con­ve­nience caused by the pro­tract­ed de­liv­ery of the pass­ports, it is clear that the phas­ing out of the ex­ist­ing pass­ports is im­por­tant for T&T's se­cu­ri­ty and its in­ter­na­tion­al com­mit­ments. As Min­is­ter Joseph not­ed at the Jan­u­ary 2007 func­tion: "In re­cent years, the num­ber of coun­ter­feit­ed or fraud­u­lent pass­ports used for in­ter­na­tion­al crimes and il­le­gal mi­gra­tion has been in­creas­ing. To im­pede this sit­u­a­tion, the ICAO has pur­sued in­ter­na­tion­al stan­dard­i­s­a­tion of pass­ports to make them more se­cure and dif­fi­cult to coun­ter­feit." And, as the ev­i­dence from 9/11 bomb­ings in the US has shown, coun­ter­feit or fraud­u­lent pass­ports are of­ten used in the com­mis­sion of transna­tion­al crimes such as ter­ror­ism. Min­is­ter Joseph al­so not­ed that "em­ploy­ing new tech­nolo­gies such as the ma­chine read­able pass­port sys­tem will en­sure that cit­i­zens can re­ly on a trav­el doc­u­ment of the high­est in­tegri­ty. "As we know, pass­port fraud can fa­cil­i­tate ac­tiv­i­ties that re­sult in sig­nif­i­cant dam­age to a coun­try's na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty, in­fra­struc­ture, or in­ter­na­tion­al rep­u­ta­tion."