New type of biometric passports as indicators of Government inaction and irresponsible behavior

On January 1, 2017, the term of the contract signed with the Polish PWPW company, which ran the system of biometric passports and identification cards of the Republic of Armenia and supplied blanks, expired.

Last year, according to the bill proposed by the government, the validity period of the previously existing biometric passports was extended for another year, until January 1, 2024.

During the discussion of the issue in the National Assembly, the co-rapporteur on the bill, MP of the National Assembly, Armen Khachatryan, asked to vote in favor of giving the government one more year to introduce the new type of biometric passport system: “The biometric passports that have been issued since 2012 are considered not to meet the technical terms, and a new passport and document form will be developed, for which the government needs another year. Hence, please vote in favor of this bill,” urged the MP.

MP Arsen Torosyan asked: “Can we all agree now, here, that we will never again extend the validity period of the previous passports and our authorized body will not come up with a new bill to discuss the same issue here, say, a year later?”

In response to the question, Armen Khachatryan “expressed hope” that this will not happen. “I sincerely hope that there will never be any more extensions related to passports. […] I am full of hope that within this one year all the works will be completed and we will finally have the passport and the documents […] that we should have”.

In response, NA Vice President Ruben Rubinyan, who chaired the session, demanded that they should not be full of hope, but follow that the works are done. “But in any case, let’s not be full of hope, but make sure that it happens, because this is not a place for hopes, but for the implementation of policies and oversight. And I think our colleagues from the Police heard the position of the National Assembly.”

This meant that starting 2024 citizens should have had the opportunity to get a new type of biometric passports.

However, it turns out that this time too, the Government, represented by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, could not introduce the new biometric passport system in the promised time.

During this year, the Ministry of Internal Affairs made two major procurements. One of them was the procurement of 200,000 identification cards for AMD 144.4 million from “Polish Securities Enterprise” JSC in February of this year under the “from a single person” procurement procedure, and in November of last year, under the contract signed with “Pervi Pechatni Dvor”, the ministry acquired 700,000 old passports for AMD 945 million under the”urgently from one person” procedure. No procurement of new passports was actually made.

In other words, it is obvious that the Government not only cannot start the process of issuing new type of biometric passports from January of this year, but also has not procured them yet.

This is the reason why it was once again decided to postpone the introduction of the new system. The discussion of this issue took place a few days ago at the meeting of the Standing Committee on Defense and Security of the National Assembly. However, unlike previous years, this time Head of the Migration and Citizenship Service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Armen Ghazaryan, who brought the bill to the National Assembly, could not clearly state when the process of issuing the new type of biometric passports is planned to be launched.

Nerses Yeritsyan, member of the Information Systems Council of the Republic of Armenia, said that the issuance of new biometric passports can begin no earlier than the second half of 2025, because it is first necessary to understand what characteristics the passports should have, and then a tender will be announced, and in the best case, we will have the winner in the second half of 2024, and the introduction of the system will last one year.

Thus, it should be noted that the promise made last year that it would be the last time to extend the validity period of old passports was false. Citizens of Armenia will continue to receive passports of the old model, because the Government has not even decided what the new passport will look like. At the moment, it is only known that international consultants have been selected and have launched a study aimed at submitting recommendations that would meet Armenia’s needs. And the issuance of the new type of biometric passports can start from the second half of 2025 at best.

Sevada Ghazaryan