Manila: The Presidential Palace on Monday rejected plans by the Department of Foreign Affairs secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. to make Filipinos go through the process of submitting birth documents for passport renewals.
“Applicants (for electronic passports) should not be burdened by submitting original copies of their certificates of live birth, obtaining which requires another application process before the Philippine Statistics Authority, to renew their passports just because the producer lost their relevant data,” Presidential spokesman Salvador Panelo said in a statement.
Plan rejected
The palace spokesman was referring to plans by Locsin to compel Filipinos applying for the renewal of their passports to submit birth documents that will ascertain their Filipino citizenship after the firm contracted for printing the passport, UGEC (United Graphic Expression Corporation), allegedly "made off" with the personal data of passport holders.
Panelo said that as it stands, securing travel documents is already burdensome for Filipinos.
The ongoing practice is not only cumbersome to everyone affected but is a form of red tape which this administration frowns upon and will not tolerate.
“The ongoing practice is not only cumbersome to everyone affected but is a form of red tape which this administration frowns upon and will not tolerate,” he added.
The current administration had made considerable headway in making passport processing more efficient, cutting down the waiting time from weeks during the first months of the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte, to just several days.
Birth documents
But statements from Locsin saying that applicants would have to go through with the tedious process of securing and authenticating their birth documents again, threw a monkey wrench on the already smooth process of securing the certificates and was frowned upon by Filipinos.
Locsin’s statements also conflict with that of his predecessor, Perfecto Yasay who said that the data was not really taken by UGEC.
Yasay said the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) “cannot hold UGEC accountable for any breach or screw up in the printing of the E-passport,” because the whole deal was illegal from the start.
Yasay said UGEC secured the contract to produce the Machine Readable Electronic Passports (MREP) or e-Passports, during the administration of President Benigno Aquino III in 2015.
“On February 10, 2017, no less than Chief Presidential Legal Counsel, Salvador S. Panelo determined that the assignment of the passport printing services to UGEC was illegal and demanded that all rights over all the personal data, source code, data centre and other information relating to the performance of the E-passport printing services unlawfully subcontracted to UGEC be reconveyed to the DFA or be acknowledged to be exclusively owned and controlled by the DFA,” Yasay said.
“Upon information and belief, it appears that UGEC which continues the illegal production of the E-passports has not complied,” Yasay added.
Not conclusive
Panelo, now speaking as Presidential Spokesman, said it is not yet conclusive to say that the passport data was missing.
“We don’t even know if data is really missing or not. I need to know exactly. I’m waiting for the DFA to tell us,” Panelo said during a Palace briefing on Monday.
“We’re writing the DFA regarding that matter. We’re also writing PCOO (Presidential Communications and Operations Office, which also had a hand in the contract) relative to the same. We’re writing also UGEC,” he added.
According to Panelo, the DFA, PCOO, and UGEC owes it to Filipinos to clarify “the real score” if there was really a breach in passport data.
