Police Verification to be Excluded for Passport Issuance

To end the long-standing harassment related to passport issuance, police verification (identity and information validation report) is being excluded. Police verification could be removed in the process of passport issuance and renewal. Currently, police verification is carried out by the Special Branch (SB) of the police. National identity cards and birth registration are considered the primary basis for issuing passports. If these two documents are accurate, there should be no barrier to issuing a passport. This viewpoint recently came up in a meeting of the advisory council. Following this, the Ministry of Home Affairs’ Security Services Department began working on it.