Police verification not needed for passports: Yunus

Chief Advisor Muhammad Yunus has announced that police verification will no longer be necessary for issuing passports.

If an individual is involved in any crime, that is a separate issue for the police to address, he said at a Deputy Commissioners' Conference at his office on Sunday.

“Passport issuance requires police verification. I began asking, as many others may have before, why? Having a passport is a right for citizens,” he said.

“Why didn’t the police verify the birth certificate that was given to me. I didn’t have to wait for verification of the National Identity Card that I received -- I got it as a citizen of the country. The passport is also a form of ID for this nation’s citizens. No police verification will be needed in this case.”

Emphasising the interim government's decision to do away with the police verification process for passports, Yunus stressed that the move was made “days ago”. But when the deputy commissioners in attendance broke out into applause after the announcement, Yunus surmised that the news of the decision did not reach them.

“This [communication] gap should not be there. Such things exist without reason, simply to harass people for no reason,” he said.

“The government is a different matter entirely. Our job is to deliver the people's rights at their doorstep -- let’s keep that in mind.”