4 minute read
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’.
And now as we look to reopen borders and stimulate international travel, we can see that despite the progress made in automating border management since 9/11, the processes are still, mostly, transacted using paper-based documentation as a security backstop. At a time of a travel-assisted infection crisis, when information about the recent travel history and health status of the traveller is as important as confirming their identity, travel documents (and the International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis – the tattered yellow booklet that holds the handwritten and stamped record of the traveller’s vaccinations) seem powerless against highly infectious viruses that have a long incubation period and can be transmitted by asymptomatic carriers. Despite all of the benefits of paper-based documentation, and their digital equivalents, one thing they are not is dynamic. Passports and health status documents, even with remote validation for additions and amendments, cannot be updated securely and quickly enough to keep pace with a rapidly moving crisis situation. And so, inevitably, the move is towards a virtual system of travel documentation. Even before the coronavirus pandemic, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) was at work on a paperless passport. Its project, One ID, would mean the passenger providing biometric information in advance that would allow them to check in, board and pass through immigration on arrival without anyone asking them for any documentation. Additionally, IATA’s ‘Travel Pass Initiative’, which is being trialled by Singapore Airlines on flights between Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore, informs passengers of what tests, vaccines and other measures they require prior to travel. Similarly, ICAO could not have imagined the pandemic, but it was already working with various industry actors to prepare the future of digital travel credentials (DTC). A DTC is intended to substitute a conventional passport temporarily or permanently with a digital representation of the traveller’s identity, which can in turn be validated using the travel document issuing authority’s public key infrastructure. There is a growing consensus that we are moving toward adoption of some kind of Immunity Passport. In Europe, the move is spearheaded by countries that rely on tourism for a significant percentage of GDP but will be equally welcomed by the holiday makers who wish to travel to those countries for their vacations. But it’s not just the search for sun and fun that is driving this movement; Denmark and Sweden are planning their own form of COVID passport to help boost mobility and trade, and Hungary and Poland also have some form of digital immunity documentation in the works. The reality is that the paper-based passport, that was never imagined as a tool to contain viruses, is going to have to undergo some radical changes. The passport of the future – be it on paper, smartphone or cloud – will have to do more than assert our identity and nationality; it will also carry updatable and verifiable personally identifiable information about our health status. This is a massive shift in the way we view travel documents and will undoubtedly raise justifiable concerns about privacy and inclusion.
