Officials announced this week that the new and enhanced Philippine E-passport will be launched next month.
The new, ‘true’ machine-readable passport is said to be part of the overhauling of the Philippine travel document – the upgrade is said to have cost 10-billion pesos, making the document fraud-proof.
“A world class passport that would deserve the respect and recognition, of course, by all other governments,” said Cabactulan. “It will really enhance the image of the Filipino because they will now be carrying passports that I would say nearly impossible to fake, to be compromised.”
New enhancements including an embedded microchip which contains the biometrics of the traveller – including a photo, fingerprints and signature.
“It will establish a one-to-one correspondence between the document and yourself,” he Cabactulan. “In other words, it will establish beyond doubt that you are the person alleged to be holding this passport.”
The microchip is said to have provisions in it to accept future addition of needed information.
The new passport will have pages which lend to the heritage of the Philippines, and include the Banau Rice Terraces, the Philippine eagle, the Rizal Monument and more.
“It will have some educational objective as well,” he said. “There will be lines and colours and combinations here that I cannot even tell you because that’s part of the security.”
Though the staggering cost of the introduction of such a passport, the cost to process one will remain the same at $60 – the passport processing time will take about four weeks with the newly introduced document.
The new passport will be produced in APO’s world class security plant in Lima, Batangas.
Three of the new machines to produce the fraud-proof passports will be operational in April – the machines, called bookmasters, can produce and process 500 passports per hour.
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