It should come as no surprise that our bureaucrats cannot execute complicated projects in accordance with the rules, when they do not even know how to apply the appropriate procedures in the case of simple matters. On Wednesday, the Ministry of Home Affairs issued an advisory on applications for passports, the third on the subject in the course of the last two months. The three documents are not in accord on the matter of the requirements, although since the latest communication is now the valid one, its contents will nevertheless provide some relief to harried applicants. If nothing else, the entire exercise stands as an example of how things should not be done.
The sequence of official steps which confused both the public, and, it seems, some of the authorities who were charged with implementing the new requirements, began last June, when the Ministry of Home Affairs issued an advisory stating that anyone applying for a machine readable passport for the first time would have to submit a birth certificate which had been issued no more than six months prior to the application. It might be noted that this sudden inspiration from Brickdam was given public expression just before the onset of the travelling season, when the schools dismiss for the long break and many Guyanese arrange to visit their relatives overseas.
The consequences of this new stipulation produced the predictable consequences of queues at the General Post Office for forms, and very much longer queues at the General Registrar’s Office to get them processed. Further down the line, this slowed everything up at the Passport Office too. Applicants complained that they did not know if they would get their new passports in time for their travel, since the volume of work in the registrar’s office had now increased dramatically. In addition, a cynical public which rightly or wrongly is wedded to the perception that with extra payment processes can be speeded up at that office, just saw it as providing an opportunity for some individuals to inflate their salaries even more than usual.
Not everyone, it transpired, was prepared to tolerate the sixth-month requirement, and as we reported attorney Mr Saphier Husain challenged it in court. Last week, Chief Justice Ian Chang made an absolute order directed to the Chief Immigration Officer, Mr Seelall Persaud, quashing the decision that Mr Husain must produce a birth certificate issued within the last six months, and directing that Mr Persaud and his agents accept Mr Husain’s birth certificate which had been issued in 2004.
Before the final ruling was delivered, however, the Ministry of Home Affairs issued its second advisory, amending the six months requirement to two years. This still left unanswered the fundamental question of why any pre-requisite relating to birth certificates for first-time passport applicants had been instituted at all. As we reported on Tuesday, Minister of Home Affairs Clement Rohee had earlier indicated that the decision had been made in the context of concerns about fraudulent birth certificates being used to obtain travel documents. However, the advisory released on Wednesday was much vaguer about the reason: “The intention was,” it read, “to guarantee the integrity of the newly implemented machine-readable passport system.”
If the prevention of fraud was indeed the intention, then it is difficult to see how that would be accomplished by either a six-month or a two-year rule. In fact, in other places, people keep their birth certificates from the time they are born and can produce them when needed many decades later. Here a birth certificate seems to be regarded as a disposable document. However that may be, one might have thought that ensuring the General Registrar’s Office was not undermined by allegations against any member of its staff in relation to bribery, would do more to ensure the integrity of the birth certificates being issued than any six-month regulation ever could.
So now we have arrived at the point where the latest ministry advisory returns things to the status quo ante. This retreat might have been occasioned by the fact that a second citizen in the person of businessman Mr Gainlall Sookraj had gone to court over the matter, this time citing the two-year requirement. Presumably it began to dawn on the ministry that the result would be exactly the same as the first time around, and rather than subject itself to being forced to withdraw by virtue of a court order, it did so voluntarily to save face.
The official reason given was that “this arrangement was not implemented by the Guyana Police Force, as required by the Ministry of Home Affairs,” although the ministry also mentioned it was “cognizant of concerns of members of the public.” It is certainly true that members of the Force in the Immigration Department were applying the rule to everyone seeking a new passport, and not just those applying for the first time, but this particular misapprehension appears to have been held by staff at the General Registrar’s Office as well.
Significantly, staff at the Passport Office told Stabroek News that information on the first court ruling in relation to Mr Husain’s case had not been relayed to them by their superiors. Had it been, of course, the ministry could have saved itself some heartache instead of setting itself up for further embarrassment by extending the time period to two years. It was already clear from the first court case that the ministry could not apply a time period to the validity of birth certificates in principle, and a time extension therefore could not produce a different decision.
The moral of this story is that any proposed new requirement falling outside the framework of specified ministerial powers to make regulations (which even then have to be gazetted), should first be submitted to the government’s legal officer to ensure it falls within the law. After all, other duties aside, that is what Attorneys-General are there for.
