The African Union passport: A waste of time | Hacker News Reader

The African Union passport: A waste of time

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39 pointsdarshandsoni12 comments

Very good read! I was also puzzled at why diplomats who have little travel issues were first to get the passports.

I live in South Africa, and with the ruling party and president seeing their eyes on potentially making the former AU chair our next potential president; I've been quite critical of her capabilities.

I have largely thought of the AU passport as Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma's vanity project. There's lots of structural issues which you mention, that make the practicality of the passport difficult, and than none have been dealt with says a lot.

My opinion is that ECOWAS have done better in managing their region than the AU has in intervening. The recent Gambian situation being a good example. I can't talk much about SADC as we have Swaziland and Zimbabwe that are violating human rights with SA and other members not intervening much.

Your solution of adopting ECOWAS and/or other frameworks is more feasible.

Sir, there seems to be a problem with your African Union Passport, would you please follow me to the local police station to waste 2-3 hours and contemplate the absence of a bribe?

I would imagine the real issue is that other countries will likely not accept it.

And who would knowing that it's basically given out exclusively to those who bribe their local government official? Frankly, that makes the passport a stronger negative indicator that this is someone who should be allowed to cross a border.

That's a fair point when dealing with such a large number of countries (and a widely varying stage of development between them). But the passport would have to be designed to adhere to ICAO standards in any case. That would make countries legally obliged to accept it as a valid travel document. But that, in addition to all the other factors mentioned in the article, requires a lot of formalisation or written AU mandate - none of which has happened.

> designed to adhere to ICAO standards in any case. That would make countries legally obliged to accept it as a valid travel document

That can't be true. It is possible for private individuals to create documents that adhere to those specifications. In fact, some do but of course the documents are not accepted.

I stand corrected! So from what I read up, ICAO adherence only facililitates quicker processing at the entry point[0]. But member nations are not bound to anything.

So I previously thought that a country can obviously choose who it will accept with its own laws, but that it has to still recognise a valid travel document. That's obviously not true because there are many countries that refuse to recognise documents like the Israeli or Republic of China passports, despite them being perfectly standardised. Or the case of individually declared documents like the world passport or Liberland [1].

So in this case, the AU would have to formalise the status of the document in law, then member nations have to ratify it, before anyone should feel comfortable trying to travel on it. But of course, this isn't EU law that is generally well enforced; there's hardly anything stopping many African nations from flouting international, regional or even their very own set of laws! Hardly looking promising... It's just a shame there's so much wasted effort going in to this.

0 - http://www.icao.int/Security/FAL/TRIP/Pages/default.aspx

1 - https://liberland.org/en/request/

The World Passport [1] is a good example of this.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Passport

I guess they would only have to accept it if it was issued by a country that they recognize? And if the AU is not recognized as a country by other countries, they shouldn't have any obligation to accept the passport as a travel document?

Good read, but the title is entirely misleading. It's not a waste of time, the AU passport is extremely important to be rolled out.

But the current scheme is of course a sham, a mere propaganda piece. And maybe yet another scheme to get paid bribes a 2nd time. Nevertheless, you have to start somewhere to build pressure.

morocco is actually a member of the AU again, since a couple weeks

http://www.worldbulletin.net/todays-news/183967/morocco-rejo...

Right you are! I've put a footnote in the article to reflect the change in status. After all those years outside, the AU probably strategically wanted a sizeable regional power like Morocco back in. Unfortunately for the Sahrawis, apart from an EU ruling every now and then, their cause is all but forgotten.

In the larger context of the article though, it probably doesn't change much of the political reality.

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