Passports issued by Bosnia and Herzegovina are printed with a special technology, which makes them impossible to forge, according to a professor at the Faculty of Security in Banja Luka Dusko Vejnovic.
Information that the security agencies of EU significantly increased the level of caution arrived at a time when BiH was debating the acquisition of passports. The tender for the next production of passports was overturned four times and because of that citizens couldn’t get passports for a while, since there weren’t being produced, which was unseen in the history of Europe.
However, after the news regarding passport forgeries reached our country, the question regarding potential forgeries of our passport became a topic.
An expert from the University of Banja Luka and the president of the EDC Dusko Vejnovic emphasized that the personalization of passports, including a color photo of the individual, is done during the production of the passport so it’s impossible to acquire an empty one.
“That’s why our documents cannot be falsified or misused, which should give our citizens a feeling of security and give our country a strong standing among the EU institutions,” Vejnovic says.
The process of introducing third generation of biometric passports was the most important project of the Agency for Identification Documents, Registers and Data Exchange of Bosnia and Herzegovina (IDDEEA) in 2014, and this new generation of passports has been applied in Bosnia and Herzegovina since October 1st, 2015.
Public Relations Advisor of IDDEEA Amila Opardija told this to the Fena agency, adding that these are Supplemental Access Control (SAC) passports that enable safer method of entering data, greater protection of data on the chip and the information page.
She explained that these passports, compared to the previous generation, have a polycarbonate page with data, and the personal data, a smaller photo and less machine-readable area are laser engraved in one of the layers of the polycarbonate page.
Also, Opardija pointed out, the photo of the passport holder is protected from all kinds of abuse (printed in color and is located in the second layer of the polycarbonate page).
“Bosnia and Herzegovina is the first country outside the European Union and among the first in the world to implement this type of passport. In this way, were have also met the commitments made in the negotiations for visa liberalization,” stressed Opardija.
This obligation was met two months before the deadline that the European Union set for its members, so that the European Commission, at its last monitoring for the visa-free regime, which was held in early November, noted that BiH had made remarkable progress in the field of identification documents, especially in the part relating to compliance with the standards related to the third generation of passports.
Since the beginning of issuing biometric passports, IDDEEA has printed 2.2 million passports, and as for the third generation of biometric passports (SAC passports), since the beginning of issuing, 55,983 third generation biometric passports have been personalized, of which 55,893 civic passports, 45 official and 45 diplomatic biometric passports of the new generation.
