News in Brief

EU & Egypt Sign New Border Management Agreement

The European Union has signed an agreement with Egypt for the first phase of an €80 million border management programme, at a time when Egyptian migration to Europe has been rising.

The project aims to help Egypt’s coast and border guards reduce irregular migration and human trafficking along its border, and provides for the procurement of surveillance equipment such as search and rescue vessels, thermal cameras, and satellite positioning systems, according to an EU document published this month.

Since late 2016, irregular migration to Europe from Egypt’s northern coast has slowed sharply. However, migration of Egyptians across Egypt’s long desert border with Libya and from Libya’s Mediterranean coast to Europe has been on the rise, diplomats say.

From January to October of this year 16,413 migrants arriving by boat in Italy declared themselves to be Egyptian, making them the second largest group behind Tunisians, according to data published by Italy’s interior ministry.

In 2021 more than 26,500 Egyptians were stopped at the Libyan border, according to the EU Commission document.

Egypt is likely to experience intensified flows of migrants in the medium to long term due to regional instability, climate change, demographic shifts and lack of economic opportunities, the document says.

The agreement for the first €23 million phase of the project was signed during a visit to Cairo by the EU’s Commissioner for Neighbourhood and Enlargement, Oliver Varhelyi.

It will be implemented by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and CIVIPOL, a French interior ministry agency, and is expected to include the provision of four search and rescue vessels, Laurent de Boeck, head of IOM’s Egypt office, said.

One Million Irish Passports Issued

One million Irish passports have been issued this year so far, the Department of Foreign Affairs has said. The record number of passports far exceeds the 634,000 passports printed for the whole of last year.

The reopening of travel following COVID and a backlog from the pandemic are the main reasons for the surge in passports issued to date in 2022. The previous record number of passports issued in a single year was 935,000 in 2019.

In recent months there have been complaints over delays in people receiving their passports which has led to holiday cancellations.

The Sinn Féin political party has called for the opening of an Irish passport office in Northern Ireland to deal with the huge surge in applications that has followed in the wake of the Brexit vote from people living there.

In September, figures from the 2021 Northern Ireland Census revealed that there was a 63% increase in people from the North with Irish passports, compared to the previous ten years.

Last month, the Seanad in Dublin (the Irish Senate) supported a Sinn Féin motion calling for a passport office in the North. Sinn Féin Senator Niall Ó Donnghaile said that last year ‘more people from the North applied for an Irish passport than a British one’.

Speaking about recent delays in people receiving passports, Director of the Passport Service, Catherine Bannon, said many of these delays were in relation to first-time applications.

‘These are more time consuming than renewals because there are more security checks involved,’ she said. ‘So, we have brought those numbers down from a 40-day turnaround in March this year to a 20-day turnaround, which is our target.’

Cayman Islands Proposes ID Card and Digital Identity Register

The Cayman Islands government has gazetted two bills – the Identification Register Bill and the Cayman Islands Identification Card Bill – for the creation of a digital identity register and the issuance of ID cards to improve how residents interact with the government.

Sample of the ID card (© Cayman Islands government).

‘Building upon the proud pioneering heritage of the Cayman Islands, the national digital ID and its underlying suite of systems and technologies will firmly launch the Cayman Islands into the 21st century. It is an enabling innovation that will truly modernise governance and transform how Cayman Islands residents transact with government and businesses’, said André Ebanks, head of the Ministry of Investment, Innovation and Social Development (MIISD).

Tamara Ebanks, Acting Chief Officer (ACO) of MIISD, noted that ‘chief among the benefits of the national digital identity for individuals is the elegant simplicity of a single identification document, and the amount of time it will save and hassle it will reduce. We foresee a truly significant reduction in ‘red tape’ which will result from a person being treated as the same individual when transacting with numerous government entities.’

She added, ‘The digital identity also provides a necessary framework for future growth and innovation for government, as well as private sector employment and entrepreneurship. It provides an individual with a means to prove their identity through a verifiable and secure electronic process.’ 

Identity Selfies are Destroying the Photo Studio Industry

Under new plans set out by Belgian Minister of the Interior, Annelies Verlinden, citizens will soon be required to take their own identity photos for passports, foreign resident cards and identity cards in a bid to combat identity fraud.

While the move will make it more convenient for citizens and local governments, photo studios fear that the move will destroy their industry. The photo sector fears that this decision will force hundreds of professional photographers and photography studios to go out of business.

In an alternative proposal, the photo sector wants the government to allow photographers to take photos with devices that will automatically transfer information to the government in a secure manner.

Unfortunately for photo studios, this solution has been rejected by Verlinden. ‘The competent task force gave a negative opinion on the proposal made by the sector, because it did not offer sufficient guarantees in terms of the fight against fraud, IT governance, and the protection of privacy,’ she said.

Despite the concerns of photographers, the government will now push ahead with trials in several municipalities, even though it could be argued that it reduces customer choice. There is the added security concern that the digital photo provided by a holder might make it easier for a digitally manipulated photo to be substituted for an image of the true person.