Minister for Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration SHIRLEY AYORKOR Botchwey has remarked that the Ghana Card has the potential to be utilized as an e-passport.
According to her, the Ghana Card cannot currently be used to travel to other countries, either within or outside of ECOWAS, because doing so would need bilateral agreements with those nations' governments to allow the card to be accepted as a travel document.
"The ministry is in active communication with ECOWAS member nations and our bilateral partners to achieve this," she said in response to queries on the House floor yesterday.
In light of the Ghana Immigration Service's notification titled "Notice to the Public: Use of Ghana Card as a Travel Document," dated February 24, 2022, the minister stated that Ghanaians and dual nationality holders of the Ghana Card will be permitted to travel to Ghana using the Ghana Card.
"We are members of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS)." All 15 ECOWAS countries are required to provide national identity cards that also serve as ECOWAS cards.
"Once all of the nations accomplish what Ghana has done, which is to put in place a national identification scheme in which people have identity cards, we will be able to enter into each other's country with our ECOWAS card, which also happens to be our national identity card," he said.
She stated that this is the same arrangement that EU nations have established, in which holders of national ID cards, which identify a person's citizenship, may use it as a travel document to travel between EU countries.
"The Ghana Card has this kind of potential. A bilateral agreement is required for a country to accept our national identity card, and we have already begun requests for bilateral engagement and talks with a few major nations to accept our national identification [card].
"Especially right now, what we've done at ICAO, where we're now part of the Public Key Directory, it means that everyone's information is in that database," she explained.
"If you travel somewhere and lose your passport and have to check in at an airport," the minister explained, "you can use your national identification card to check in because what the airline will do is put into the database and every detail of you will come up to authenticate you as a bearer of that particular card."
"They will let you board the plane and go back home through the airport." I've heard that a few people have returned to Ghana using the national identity card," she continued.
"You may recall that Ghana was recently welcomed into the ICAO Public Key Directory (PKD), which is a central repository used to verify and authenticate biographic and biometric information on international travel documents, at a ceremony held at the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Headquarters in Montréal, Canada.
"As a result, the celebratory letter from ICAO following Ghana's decision to join the PKD did not imply in any way that the Ghana Card had become an e-passport," she explained.
"The Ghana Card may serve as an optional travel document to be utilized in concert with our biometric passport," the minister said, indicating that the Ghana Card is not a replacement for the country's present biometric passport.