Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Acting Commissioner David V. Aguilar and Republic of Korea Minster of Justice Jae-Jin Kwon will jointly announce a reciprocal agreement for each nation’s trusted traveler programs – the U.S. Global Entry and Korea Smart Entry Service – Tuesday, June 12 at Washington Dulles International Airport.
“If they can reach an agreement it would be a huge home run as we have so many UK visitors and there is still a lagging perception about the entry process which may be putting people off.”The solution discussed at the link resembles the Global Entry program but with reciprocity. Of course biometrics will be involved.
Foreign Affairs Minister Nikola Poposki and Albania's Deputy PM and Foreign Minister Edmond Haxhinasto signed Wednesday in Tirana an agreement amending the treaty signed between the Macedonian government and Albania's Council of Ministers on mutual trips of citizens, MIA's correspondent has reported.Biometric technologies make these agreements much easier to negotiate, implement and comply with.
It will harmonize a plethora of regulations and safety standards in the automobile, food and other industries. It will make it easier to obtain temporary work permits and a trusted-traveller document that will allow frequent crossers to skip the lineup at Customs.
Air, land and maritime inspections will be more fully integrated, and both sides will be able to more easily detect and deter cyber threats.
WHILE reviving the biometric system on the border with Afghanistan may be a welcome move, one hopes that the interior minister, who has said the screening process will start on Nov 30, is aware of the difficulties involved. Introduced in January 2007 at Chaman, the system was not welcomed by Afghan nationals, who attacked the border gates in protest. The arrangement had to be called off because the Kabul government, too, did not cooperate. Whether or not the scheme works this time will depend on the level of Pakistan`s determination to go ahead with it despite the odds.The article advances a one-sided Pakistani point of view but it's sufficient to illustrate an important point. Biometric ID management systems can produce great results in a functioning bilateral relationship; they can't compensate for the lack of such a relationship.
On a practical level, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States have agreed to share biometric information, such as fingerprints, with each other to lessen immigration fraud. Under the High Value Data Sharing Protocol, Canada would be able to compare fingerprint information of asylum seekers with those stored in a partner country's immigration databases. Bilateral agreements were brokered through an immigration and border security forum called the Five Country Conference."Source countries" are beginning to develop the institutional, political and technological resources necessary for effective cooperation with the Five Countries.
Rohan Gunaratna, head of the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, said the centre of gravity of human smuggling networks in the region has shifted to Malaysia and Indonesia—even as they maintain a significant presence in Thailand.
The Canadian government has established a presence in Malaysia and Indonesia, he said, including some officials working with the Bangkok-based task force. There are about another dozen people working in the region outside of Thailand, he said.
"It's a small scale arrangement but it's significant in that this is the first time that we have been running a biometric matching agreement international from an immigration point of view."
