Costa Rica Passport Makes Journey from MRP to ePassport

In 2021, as Costa Rica reached the 200-year anniversary of independence from Spain and at a time when countries around the world were struggling with the effects of COVID, the country took the bold move to upgrade its travel document from machine-readable to a fully compliant biometric passport.

Under an initiative known as Costa Rica’s Biometric Passport Project of the Bicentenary, Veridos and the Latin American system integrator GSI Sertracen were contracted by the General Department of Migration and Immigration of the Republic of Costa Rica to create and deliver ePassports with a polycarbonate data page, the software and hardware for personalisation and a solution deploying colour image technology.

The new passport illustrates the values of the country, showcasing four important facets: biodiversity, renewable energy, education and peace, and talent. These are represented in a series of motifs, designed by Esencial Costa Rica (Marca País), showing plants, animals, ancient monuments, and other elements that are unique to the countries different regions.

Under natural (left) and UV-light (right) (© Veridos, General Department of Migration and Immigration).

The passport’s pages feature more than 60 security features including holographic effects, microtext, security threads, and intaglio, latent images, relief patterns, multiple laser images, and flipbook animations – some visible to the human eye, others not.

But some of the most innovative elements sit within the passport’s main data page, taking advantage of the properties of polycarbonate.

Biometric data

State-of-the-art technology is a central component of next-generation passport systems. When a citizen of Costa Rica applies for a new passport, their fingerprints and facial image are now captured electronically by a local authority, such as the Department of Migration and Immigration, the Bank of Costa Rica, a post office, or a local consulate. The Costa Rican government stores these biometric details.

The data is then encoded on a citizen’s passport chip and data page. Not only does this make it easier for border control officials to carry out identity verification, it also makes the passport fully compliant with global identification standards, including those specified by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO).

The data page is comprised of polycarbonate material, making it extremely durable and long-lasting. This also allows security features to be directly embedded into different layers of this all-important passport page, providing it with almost complete protection from counterfeiting attempts.

Other innovative security features on the data page include multiple laser-engraved images, a transparent portrait window and the holographic strip.

Security features (© Veridos, General Department of Migration and Immigration).

CLIP ID

The passports are among the first in the Americas to include a true colour photo on a polycarbonate page. This is thanks to Veridos’s CLIP ID® high-tech colour personalisation technology, which provides colour image brilliance for each ePassport holder’s image, thereby improving visual verification.

CLIP ID (Colour Laser Image Protected ID) is an integrated solution that adds vivid colour photos to polycarbonate identity documents. It combines secure laser engraving with brilliant and durable inkjet image printing, all the while offering maximum flexibility in the production and personalisation processes. First, a black-and-white version of the image is laser-engraved, then the colour photo version is printed on top.

Marc-Julian Siewert, CEO of Veridos, said: ‘We’re very honoured to have been chosen by the General Department of Migration and Immigration to be part of the modernisation of their ID landscape. Together with GSI Sertracen, we’ve successfully transformed the current machine-readable passport system to a fully-fledged biometric travel document solution. Costa Rica is one of the most advanced countries in Latin America and their passports with our cutting-edge CLIP ID colour picture solution reflects that, too.’ The CLIP ID passport technology is already successfully employed elsewhere in the world, including Bangladesh.

CLIP – ID (© Veridos).

Challenges overcome

Like all complex projects, the Biometric Passport Project of the Bicentenary had its own set of challenges, including:

• Implementation and production in less than nine months

• Integration of a graphic design into a secure design aligned with the production process

• Migration from MRP to ePass

• Migration of the current platform to a brand-new technology

• Implementation during COVID.

But, as was evident to the judges of the Regional ID Document of the Year Award 2023, these challenges were overcome in spectacular style to deliver a visually stunning and technically advanced document.

And so it was that the Costa Rica ePassport jointly won the best new passport category at a ceremony held as part of the recent High Security Print (HSP) LatAm Conference in the Bahamas.