SYDNEY. The Philippine Consulate-General’s [Office] in Sydney will begin the issuance of the Philippine electronic passport [e-passport] and informs the holders of Philippine passports about changes in the procedure of passport issuance. The requirements remain the same, except that printed passport photographs will no longer be necessary. E-passport issuance is targeted to begin on 1 October 2010.
The personal appearance of the passport holder will be mandatory for all, including newborn infants, toddlers, and elderly persons. There will be no exemptions to the personal appearance requirement. The passport holder’s facial photograph, fingerprints, and signature will be taken directly by on-site equipment, and the e-passport system does not accept printed photographs or scanned fingerprints and signatures.
The cost for the regular application of an e-passport is One Hundred and Eight Dollars, Australian currency (AUD 108). An e-passport will be ready for collection by the passport holder six weeks after lodgement of the application, as the e-passport is produced in a Central Bank facility in Manila. The Philippine e-passport has a validity of five years.
The Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs began to issue e-passports in August 2009, in accordance with the agreement of all United Nations Member States to comply with the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) targets for a global interoperability of the validation system for electronic machine readable travel documents. The Philippine Consulate in Sydney recently acquired the necessary equipment to process e-passport applications.
The heart of the Philippine e-passport is a tamper-proof microchip bearing the passport holder’s identification and personal information. The chip can be read by standard border control machines worldwide. It has security measures which encrypts and embeds the passport holder’s information in specific parts of the passport. Border control machines decode and read this information and compare them to the data on the microchip. Discrepancies between the two data sets indicate that the passport has been tampered.
With the implementation of the e-passport system, the Consulate will discontinue the issuance of the previous passport types, i.e., the Machine Readable Passport (MRP) and the manually-scripted Green Passport. The Consulate will also discontinue the extension of these passport types and the amendment of names on the passport. Under the e-passport system, any changes in the information of the passport can be made only with the application for a new passport.
Previous Philippine passport types will remain valid until their indicated expiry date. – ?