At a meeting held between officials at MoFA recently, ICAO officials expressed concern over the system of issuing passports without verifying citizenship.[break] The ICAO officials expressed their worry that the existing system could encourage fraudsters to acquire passport through crooked means.
Sources said ICAO has requested MoFA officials to make arrangements to issue Machine Readable Passports (MRPs) only after verifying the citizenship papers and also to make police reports mandatory to check possible misuse.
“It is meaningless to issue passports without verifying the citizenship certificates,” a source close to MoFA quoted the ICAO officials as saying. “The numbers of those acquiring fake passports will be greater than persons with bona fide passports if the existing system remains in place any further.”
Currently, issuing of passports has been centralized at MoFA. MoFA sends copies of citizenship certificates to the district headquarters concerned for verification only if officials suspect them to be fake.
Though all necessary preparations have already been made to issue MRPs, MoFA has not been able to decide a date for the issue due to the prolonged absence of Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal. Prime Minister Nepal returned home only on Friday after a 10-day visit to Cambodia and Belgium.
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