[www.inewsguyana.com] – The Ministry of Home Affairs in an advisory today (Wednesday, July 30), announced the scrapping the recent two year Birth Certificate requirement it had made mandatory earlier this month for persons seeking to acquire a Machine Readable Passport.
This comes on the heels of the scrapping of an earlier six month timeline it had imposed on June 5, which was met with wide spread criticism and legal challenges.
The Ministry reiterated that the intention was to guarantee the integrity of the newly implemented machine-readable passport system.
“Unfortunately this arrangement was not implemented by the Guyana Police Force, as required by the Ministry of Home Affairs,” a statement from the Ministry said.
The Ministry said too that “cognizant of the concerns of members of the public, along with the Guyana Police Force has reviewed the entire system pertaining to the issuance of passports.”
According to the Ministry, persons applying for passports are asked to submit the following:
- Passport Application Form
- Birth Certificate
- One (1) Passport –size photograph and
- A fee of four thousand ($4,000) Guyana dollars.
Meanwhile, In relation to lost/damaged passport the processing fee $15,000 and additional conditionalities are required to be satisfied to facilitate issuance.
The Guyana Police Force through its Immigration Department will make all reasonable efforts to expedite the processing of the applications but the five (5) day processing time guaranteed by the Force is not likely to be honoured because of the need for a more robust verification process to accompany the production of the Travel Document.
Presently the Birth certificate is a simple piece of paper that can be forged easily, I strongly recommend that the authorities should start issuing a proper secured certificate with some security features which would make it difficult to be forged. It will have a cost attached but as long as you take care with this document it can last your lifetime.
the man in charge of security does not know anything about security…case closed
The Goat Man has finally gotten some sense. It was a crass policy to implement from the beginning.