Govt to phase out birth certificate as requirement for acquiring a Ghanaian passport

Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister, Mohammad Habibu Tijani, has disclosed that his outfit is working very hard with the Interior Ministry to phase out birth certificate as one of the requirements for acquiring a Ghanaian passport.

He disclosed that, the Local Government Ministry will also be consulted in carrying out this exercise.

“Passports, before any applicant is considered for the Ghanaian passport, we have a number of factors that come into play. It is true that birth certificates have been one of the fundamental requirements for getting a Ghanaian passport.

“But I want to also add that it is not only the birth certificate because sometimes we are able to detect that people have the birth certs but they are not even genuine ones,” he told Evans Mensa on Newsnite.

This decision comes after a Supreme Court ruling that the birth certificate is not a form of identification because the document does not establish “the identity of the bearer”.

“Other times people are found not to be Ghanaians also having birth certificates,” Mr Tijani said.

“Hitherto it, we were thinking of working closely with the NIA because if every Ghanaian has an identification, it will be easier to have to credible information about their identities.”

“So that anyone coming to us for passport will not be asking the same questions that the person went through in acquiring the national ID, once we are linked it’s a matter of checking one or two things because every information that is required to give out a passport, we already have it,” he added.

“So after this ruling, we will be awaiting to get instructions from the Ministry of Interior whiles we are increasing our vigilance on questioning applicants,” he said.