Danish Embassy yet to approve Uganda's new East African Community passport
Ugandans holding the new East African Community passport and planning to travel to Denmark will have to wait a little longer after the Danish embassy said they are yet to approve the passport that was launched in December 2018.
So far, there have been two Ugandan Visa applications with the new passports who intend to travel to Copenhagen in April 2019, according to Uganda’s ministry of foreign affairs.
However, the Danish embassy said they could not issue visa to the holders of the new passport because it had not yet been approved.
“This passport is not yet approved by the Danish authorities and therefore, we cannot issue visa for this passport. We do not know how long it takes for this new passport to be approved. We can keep an application open in our visa system for 15 days,” reads part of the email by Anne Ostman, a consular officer at the Danish Embassy in Nairobi Kenya, responding to one of the applicants.
However, Uganda’s ministry of foreign affairs said in a statement that the Embassy of Denmark, like all other Diplomatic and Consular Missions and International Organisations accredited to Uganda were informed and issued samples of the new passports in December 2018.
“According to the Danish Embassy in Kampala, the Samples were forwarded to the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in January 2019. The process of entering the new Ugandan East African Community Passports into their system is ongoing and shall be concluded soon. The [two] applicants have been assured that their applications will be processed as soon as the registration process is completed. The ministry wishes therefore to appeal to the public to be patient as the immigration authorities of the Foreign governments update their systems,” reads part of the statement circulated by Ms Margaret Kafeero, the head of public diplomacy at Ministry of Foreign affairs.
The e-passports that Uganda started issuing on December 10, 2018 intend to replace the old machine readable passports which are expected to be phased out by January 2021.
