A New Passport System to be Introduced at Immigration Dept.

A new passport system will be introduced in Belize later this month at a cost of roughly twenty million dollars to the Government of Belize. The introduction of an updated procedure is expected to do away with the bottleneck that has plagued the existing, antiquated system. It will also eliminate the small-time hustling that has been taking place in the lines at the Immigration Department. According to Immigration Minister Eamon Courtenay, applications will now be handled online and passports can be picked at the local immigration office in each district.

Eamon Courtenay

Eamon Courtenay, Minister of Immigration

“Once we put in place the new passport which we are expecting to launch on October twenty-fourth, I expect that those lines will disappear dramatically because you will be able to get your passport in your own district, there will be no need to come to Belmopan or Belize City. So that will disappear, by and large. The process will be an online application, so you are applying online, you get an appointment and you go deal with your passport. So it’s not just a matter of pulling up on a Wednesday or a Thursday. It’s much more organized and structured, so we expect that with modernization that corruption, petty corruption will disappear. And not only the petty corruption but the long lines and the uncomfortable nature, I mean we regret very much that this is how the system has disintegrated and that’s where it had reached. It should never be like that, that’s not the type of service we want to deliver to the Belizean people.”