China
Africa
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
Air Law Issues
Published in Ruwantissa I.R. Abeyratne, Frontiers of Aerospace Law, 2017
The machine-readable passport (MRP) is a passport that has both a machine-readable zone and a visual zone in the page that has descriptive details of the owner. The machine-readable zone enables rapid machine clearance, quick verification and instantaneous recording of personal data. Besides these advantages, the MRP also has decided security benefits, such as the possibility of matching very quickly the identity of the MRP owner against the identities of undesirable persons, while at the same time offering strong safeguards against alteration, counterfeit or forgery. Another advantage of the MRP is the fact that the document obviates the need for passengers to lodge embarkation or disembarkation cards, on the assumption that countries installing automatic reader equipment would accept the data on the passport as sufficient for their clearance purposes. Of course, the MRP had to offer safeguards equal to or better than those of conventional passports and satisfy those control requirements already set by conventional passports and other travel documents in use throughout the world. Also, since it was only natural that a certain number of states would not have wished to issue the MRP or adopt new procedures related thereto, it was expected that a machine-readable system and conventional passport procedures would operate side-by-side for some time.
Standardizing security: the business case politics of borders
Published in Mobilities, 2018
In 1968, ICAO established an advisory panel on machine readable features of passports, and by 1978, ICAO published the first standard on machine readable passport documents. In 1986, a permanent working group named TAG/MRTD (Technical Advisory Group/Machine Readable Travel Documents) was established, and by the mid-1990s that working group started to work on the standardization of biometrics for MRTD. In 2002, the so-called ‘Berlin Resolution’ specified that the face should be the standard biometric modality stored on machine readable passport documents, and in 2003, this resolution was implemented into ICAO’s Doc 9303, thereby becoming the new biometric standard for travel documents all over the world (Rommetveit 2016, 117; Stanton 2008, 262). Doc 9303 allows the additional inclusion of fingerprint and iris templates, but determining the face as the standard biometric modality has led to the situation that as of 2017, the overwhelming majority of global eMRTD contains a biometric image of the face.