Passport
A passport is a formal travel document issued by a government that certifies a person's identity and nationality for international travel. A passport allows its bearer to enter and temporarily reside in a foreign country, access local aid and protection, and obtain consular assistance from their government. In addition to facilitating travel, passports are a key mechanism for border security and regulating migration; they may also serve as identity documents for various domestic purposes.
State-issued travel documents have existed in some form since antiquity; the modern passport was universally adopted and standardized in 1920. The passport takes the form of a booklet bearing the name and emblem of the issuing government and containing the biographical information of the individual, including their full name, photograph, place and date of birth, and signature. A passport does not create any rights in the country being visited nor impose any obligation on the issuing country; rather, it provides certification to foreign government officials of the holder's identity and right to travel, with pages available for inserting entry and exit stamps and travel visas—endorsements that allow the individual to enter and temporarily reside in a country for a period of time and under certain conditions.
Since 1998, many countries have transitioned to biometric passports, which contain an embedded microchip to facilitate authentication and safeguard against counterfeiting. As of July 2024, over 150 jurisdictions issue such "e-passports"; previously issued non-biometric passports usually remain valid until expiration.
Eligibility for a passport varies by jurisdiction, although citizenship is a common prerequisite. However, a passport may be issued to individuals who do not have the status or full rights of citizenship, such as American or British nationals. Likewise, certain classes of individuals, such as diplomats and government officials, may be issued special passports that provide certain rights and privileges, such as immunity from arrest or prosecution.
While passports are typically issued by national governments, certain subnational entities are authorised to issue passports to citizens residing within their borders. Additionally, other types of travel documents may serve a similar role to passports but are subject to different eligibility requirements, purposes, or restrictions.
History
Etymology and origin
sources show that the term "passport" may derive from a document required by some medieval Italian states in order for an individual to pass through the physical harbor or gate of a walled city or jurisdiction. Such documents were issued by local authorities to foreign travellers—as opposed to local citizens, as is the modern practice—and generally contained a list of towns and cities the document holder was permitted to enter or pass through. On the whole, documents were not required for travel to seaports, which were considered open trading points, but documents were required to pass harbor controls and travel inland from seaports. The transition from private to state control over movement was an essential aspect of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Communal obligations to provide poor relief were an important source of the desire for controls on movement.:10Antecedents
One of the earliest known references to paperwork that served an analogous role to a passport is found in the Hebrew Bible. Nehemiah 2:7–9, dating from approximately 450 BC, states that Nehemiah, an official serving King Artaxerxes I of Persia, asked permission to travel to Judea; the king granted leave and gave him a letter "to the governors beyond the river" requesting safe passage for him as he traveled through their lands.The ancient Indian political text Arthashastra mentions passes issued at the rate of one masha per pass to enter and exit the country, and describes the duties of the who must issue sealed passes before a person could enter or leave the countryside.
Passports were an important part of the Chinese bureaucracy as early as the Western Han, if not in the Qin dynasty. They required such details as age, height, and bodily features. These passports determined a person's ability to move throughout imperial counties and through points of control. Even children needed passports, but those of one year or less who were in their mother's care may not have needed them.
In the medieval Islamic Caliphate, a form of passport was the bara'a, a receipt for taxes paid. Only people who paid their zakah or jizya taxes were permitted to travel to different regions of the Caliphate; thus, the bara'a receipt was a "basic passport".
In the 12th century, the Republic of Genoa issued a document called Bulletta, which was issued to the nationals of the Republic who were traveling to the ports of the emporiums and the ports of the Genoese colonies overseas, as well as to foreigners who entered them.
King Henry V of England is credited with having invented what some consider the first British passport in the modern sense, as a means of helping his subjects prove who they were in foreign lands. The earliest reference to these documents is found in a 1414 Act of Parliament. In 1540, granting travel documents in England became a role of the Privy Council of England, and it was around this time that the term "passport" was used. In 1794, issuing British passports became the job of the Office of the Secretary of State. In the Holy Roman Empire, the 1548 Imperial Diet of Augsburg required the public to hold imperial documents for travel, at the risk of permanent exile.
In 1791, Louis XVI masqueraded as a valet during his Flight to Varennes as passports for the nobility typically included a number of persons listed by their function but without further description.:31–32
A Pass-Card Treaty of October 18, 1850 among German states standardized information including issuing state, name, status, residence, and description of bearer. Tramping journeymen and jobseekers of all kinds were not to receive pass-cards.:92–93
Before World War I, in most situations only adult males could receive a passport; their family members were written in their passport if they traveled with them. Even if a married woman had her own passport, she could not use it without her husband present.:93–94
Modern development
A rapid expansion of railway infrastructure and wealth in Europe beginning in the mid-nineteenth century led to large increases in the volume of international travel and a consequent unique dilution of the passport system for approximately thirty years prior to World War I. The speed of trains, as well as the number of passengers that crossed multiple borders, made enforcement of passport laws difficult. The general reaction was the relaxation of passport requirements. In the later part of the nineteenth century and up to World War I, passports were not required, on the whole, for travel within Europe, and crossing a border was a relatively straightforward procedure. Consequently, comparatively few people held passports.During World War I, European governments introduced border passport requirements for security reasons, and to control the emigration of people with useful skills. These controls remained in place after the war, becoming a standard, though controversial, procedure. British tourists of the 1920s complained, especially about attached photographs and physical descriptions, which they considered led to a "nasty dehumanisation". The British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act was passed in 1914, clearly defining the notions of citizenship and creating a booklet form of the passport. It also made a photographs in a passport mandatory.:93
In 1920, the League of Nations held a conference on passports, the Paris Conference on Passports & Customs Formalities and Through Tickets. Passport guidelines and a general booklet design resulted from the conference, which was followed up by conferences in 1926 and 1927. The League of Nations issued Nansen passports to stateless refugees from 1922 to 1938.
While the United Nations held a travel conference in 1963, no passport guidelines resulted from it. Passport standardization came about in 1980, under the auspices of the ICAO. ICAO standards include those for machine-readable passports. Such passports have an area where some of the information otherwise written in textual form is written as strings of alphanumeric characters, printed in a manner suitable for optical character recognition. This enables border controllers and other law enforcement agents to process these passports more quickly, without having to input the information manually into a computer. ICAO publishes Doc 9303 Machine Readable Travel Documents, the technical standard for machine-readable passports. A more recent standard is for biometric passports. These contain biometrics to authenticate the identity of travellers. The passport's critical information is stored on a small RFID computer chip, much like information stored on smartcards. Like some smartcards, the passport booklet design calls for an embedded contactless chip that is able to hold digital signature data to ensure the integrity of the passport and the biometric data.
Historically, legal authority to issue passports is founded on the exercise of each country's executive discretion. Certain legal tenets follow, namely: first, passports are issued in the name of the state; second, no person has a legal right to be issued a passport; third, each country's government, in exercising its executive discretion, has complete and unfettered discretion to refuse to issue or to revoke a passport; and fourth, that the latter discretion is not subject to judicial review. However, legal scholars including A.J. Arkelian have argued that evolutions in both the constitutional law of democratic countries and the international law applicable to all countries now render those historical tenets both obsolete and unlawful.