Manama: Qatar is planning to drop the residence permit (RP) stickers it places on the passports of expatriates living in the country, local media have reported.
Smart ID cards will be used instead for personal identification under the new system to be adopted by Qatar.
The system was included in a proposal submitted by officials at the meeting of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) immigration directors in Doha.
Under the proposal, all vital information about the expatriate residents will be stored in the card, cancelling the need for the stickers on their passports.
Officials said that other GCC countries could also drop the RP stickers in the near future.
Home to millions of foreigners, mainly unskilled Asian labourers in the construction and service sectors, the GCC countries — Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — have adopted several policies to deal administratively with their expatriates and worked on coordinating their positions.
According to the reports in Doha, the high-level meeting reviewed the establishment of an electronic link between the GCC countries to increase coordination and ease the issuance of visas and residence permits.
“The meeting discussed the issues of training staff in cooperation with Nayef Arab University for Security Sciences as well as coordination between the GCC states on passports,” one official was quoted as saying by local Arabic daily Al Arab. “It also reviewed the issue of the common GCC visa.”
Several voices in the Gulf, especially among the business and tourism communities, have called for adopting a unified GCC visa, similar to the Schengen visa in Europe, that would allow its holder to move between the member states of the alliance.
