Secretariat - Action against Terrorism Unit

The Travel Document Security Programme is one of the longest running OSCE counter-terrorism programmes.

The OSCE participating States recognized very early the importance of improving travel document security throughout the OSCE region for the success in the fight against terrorism. This has formed part of the core of the Organization's counter-terrorism work since 2003.

The Bucharest Plan of Action for Combating Terrorism, adopted in December 2001, highlights the importance of preventing the movement of terrorists through effective border control and controls on the issuing of identity papers and travel documents as well as preventing their counterfeiting, forgery and fraudulent use. 

Building on the Bucharest Plan of Action, subsequent OSCE Ministerial Councils adopted additional decisions, which provided a more concrete and practical dimension to OSCE work in the area of travel document security.

The Maastricht Ministerial Council decided that all OSCE participating States should aim to comply fully, by December 2004, with the minimum security standards for the handling and issuance of passports and other travel documents elaborated by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). Additionally, all OSCE participating States should begin to issue machine readable travel documents (MRTDs), if possible with digitized photographs, by December 2005. Moreover, the Decision envisages the standard issuing of passports with one or more biometric identifiers.

The 2004 OSCE Ministerial Council in Sofia (MC Decision No. 4/04) decided that the OSCE participating States should rapidly report all instances of lost and stolen international travel documents, either individually personalized or blank (unassigned), to INTERPOL's Automated Search Facility/Stolen Travel Document Database (ASF-SLTD).

Recalling Decision No. 4/04, the 2006 Ministerial Council in Brussels decided that all OSCE participating States would make every effort to provide national first-line law enforcement end-users with integrated real-time access to the INTERPOL ASF-SLTD by implementing, where appropriate, the INTERPOL technical platforms as soon as financially and technically possible. Furthermore, it called on OSCE participating States to make available to INTERPOL a 24/7 contact to confirm the status of documents in question and to resolve "hits" to the INTERPOL database at border checkpoints in a timely and correct manner.

The ATU has undertaken considerable efforts aimed at providing and facilitating technical capacity-building assistance in the implementation of the said commitments.

The activities in this area, funded mostly through extra-budgetary contributions by the US, Spanish and Norwegian governments, but also by other donors, such as Germany, Lithuania and the Czech Republic as well as through the OSCE's Unified Budget, have been organized in four specific directions: 

1. Enhancing capacities and improving cross-border co-operation in detecting and preventing the use of fraudulent and counterfeit travel documents;
2. Encouraging the upgrade of the technological security features of travel documents, to make it more difficult for terrorists and other criminals to forge/counterfeit them;
3. Implementing the ICAO Minimum Security Standards for Handling and Issuance of Passports to enhance the reliability and trustworthiness of the whole process and to reduce the possibility of terrorists and other criminals to obtain perfectly legitimate and bona fide travel documents;
4. Encouraging the rapid and regular reporting of lost and stolen travel documents to INTERPOL, as well as the deployment of Fixed & Mobile Interpol Network Database (FIND & MIND) to provide first-line law enforcement end-users with real-time access to the INTERPOL database and reduce the possibility of lost and stolen passports being used for terrorist and other criminal purposes.

Activities in this area have included the following: 

• a major conference in Vienna in March 2004, organized jointly with ICAO, and a follow-up OSCE-wide workshop in Vienna in July 2007, both of which were aimed at senior national officials working on travel document security;
• five regional workshops on combating the use of fraudulent and counterfeit travel documents held in 2003 and 2004 in Ohrid, Bishkek, Zagreb, Tallinn and Tashkent;
• three regional workshops on the ICAO Minimum Security Standards for Handling and Issuance of Passports, held in 2005 and 2006 in Sofia, Almaty and Vilnius;
• a regional workshop for the Mediterranean Region in 2007, which placed an emphasis on encouraging the OSCE Mediterranean Partners for Co-operation to implement on a voluntary basis the OSCE commitments in the area of travel document security;
• three national specific workshops in Serbia (2006), Uzbekistan (2007) and Bosnia and Herzegovina (2008), focusing on new document technology, handling and issuance, and connection to INTERPOL databases;
• four intensive training courses to help improve capacities of border police and customs officials to detect forged documents in The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia in 2007 and in Montenegro, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan in 2008; and
• visits by ICAO and INTERPOL experts to provide technical advice and recommendations to requesting participating States on new security features, enhancements and standards for travel documents, as well as in determining the feasibility of providing border control points with real-time connection to SLTD database.