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Passport dispute threatens French travel to US
French travellers risk delays or even being refused entry to the US because of a dispute over biometric passports.The Interior Ministry is embroiled in a court battle with the unions of the Imprimerie Nationale, the state-owned printing agency, over a decision to award a contract to provide the high security passports to Oberthur Card Systems, a smart-card maker. The unions, which think the Imprimerie Nationale should produce the passports, have managed to block Oberthur from beginning production after a Paris court ruled that the public agency had a monopoly on secure administrative documents. France is one of 27 "visa waiver" countries whose citizens should require only a passport to travel to the US. But it is now the only one that has not complied with US rules that came into force last October requiring passports to have an embedded digital photograph, excluding it from the scheme. An American official said yesterday that visa applications to the American embassy in Paris had risen more than twofold while the average wait had reached six weeks. "The US has been watching this as a train wreck in slow motion," said the official. "The [French] government has assured us and assured us and assured us that they would have the biometric passports. "There have been cases where people have got to the airport and realised they need a visa. "We've had to make Herculean efforts to shoe-horn them in." Posted by: lotp 2006-01-11 |
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