Passports Were Never Imagined for Mass Commercial Transport – or Pandemics By Editorial Team
King Henry V of England is credited by many as having issued the first passports, in the modern sense, by a 1414 Act of Parliament. Initially, they were a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ between the courts of sometimes hostile countries that were intended to allow foreign travellers passage in and out of the kingdom for the purpose of trade and negotiations. The passport still has the role of a protected passage travel document, requesting sovereign countries to ‘allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance’ – in the words of the UK passport. But with the advent of widespread migration in response to wars, famines and economic privations, governments started to look to passports as a means of security and identification to help manage the influx of people. Passports became a requirement for international travel immediately after World War I, and a move towards the standardisation of the modern passport was made in 1920, through the League of Nations. In 1947, this was placed under the remit of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), which continues to set passport standards to this day. With the introduction of biometric technology in Malaysia in 1998, passports have now become increasingly secure, while also able to provide more information about their holders through the use of an embedded electronic chip. Today, there are more than 100 states and non-state entities issuing ePassports, and over 490 million ePassports in circulation. So, what started as a privilege reserved for a tiny minority of society now facilitates the explosion in affordable international travel which has resulted in air passenger volumes increasing year-on-year since 1990, with two notable exceptions . The first of these was a fall of 19% in October 2001 (after the 9/11 attacks) and then in March 2020 when volumes (by revenue passenger kilometres) fell by 53%. The reason for this truly incredible drop in international travel is clear – COVID-19 and other respiratory tract infections do not respect borders. In the early days of the spread of the virus, governments seemed powerless to identify who was travelling into their country from affected areas. The inability to identify and isolate these travellers allowed the virus to spread rapidly across the globe through a series of ‘imported cases’.
10 HEALTH STATUS PROOF | WHITE PAPER No.1
