Stolen passport use rarely monitored
40M documents lost, few countries check Interpol
International travelers be advised: Almost 13 years after the 9/11 attacks, in a world awash in the kind of bogus passports that helped that plot succeed, your travel document remains easy to steal, replicate and adulterate — and often no one’s checking.
“Passports are a very weak link” in the world’s travel security system, Michael Greenberger, a former Clinton administration official and director of the University of Maryland Center for Health and Homeland Security, said Sunday.
His comments came as investigators tried to determine if stolen passports used by two passengers played a role in Saturday’s disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines flight bound for China with 239 people on board.
Although there are millions of passports listed as stolen, lost or missing in the world, only a few countries systematically check for them at airport gates.
Greenberger said that despite concerns raised by the 9/11 Commission in its report in 2004, there’s still no effective way to ensure that the person presenting a passport is the one to whom it was issued.
More than 40 million travel documents, mostly passports, have been reported stolen or missing, according to a database begun in 2002 by the international law enforcement organization Interpol.
Yet, “only a handful of countries worldwide are taking care to make sure that persons possessing stolen passports are not boarding international flights,” Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble said Sunday.
Interpol said that no country checked the two passports used to board the Boeing 777 bound from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, even though they were reported stolen in Thailand — an Austrian one in 2012 and an Italian one in 2013 — and that it can’t say how many other times they might have been used.
The U.S. uses Interpol’s database more than any other nation to screen travelers. Its 250 million annual checks are followed by the United Kingdom’s 120 million and the United Arab Emirates’ 50 million.
Interpol said it makes its database available to all 190 member countries but cannot force them to integrate it into their own systems. Last year, passengers boarded planes more than a billion times without having their passports screened against its database.