Senate adds measures to protect indebted people living abroad from passport rejection

People living abroad with an outstanding debt owed to the government could see their application for a passport rejected under the Passport Act. However, the Senate has decided that this group will now receive more legal protection from the administrative courts.

Before somebody can be denied a passport, they must be in the Register Passportalerts. This happens when a government body asks the minister of interior affairs to add somebody to the register when they have an open debt with, for example, the tax authority, and they have not made payments or made arrangements to tackled the debt.

There has to be a “concrete suspicion” that the person is trying to escape their debts from abroad.

Once the person has been put into the register, their passport can be denied. First, it was only possible to object to the decision when the passport was denied, but now people can also object to the fact that they have been put on the Register Passportalerts list by starting a procedure with the administrative judge. The request made to the minister and the registration can be challenged.

A second change to help protect people abroad with debts is that the government body must investigate whether “there is good reason to doubt the legality of the passport alert” when a passport is denied. If there is a valid reason, the passport must be given to the person in question.

Before this change, a passport would always get denied in this situation unless the passport alert was “evidently incorrect.”

The Senate decided on these two extra protective measures due to two rulings on Wednesday. One of the instances saw somebody who was staying in Bulgaria denied a new passport due to a student loan debt with the education agency DUO, but the highest administrative court decided that this case required a check on whether there was a concrete reason to doubt the passport alert. There was not.

In the second ruling, someone had argued on appeal that a passport alert should be allowed to be challenged due to the severe consequences a passport denial can have. The Senate agreed with the person, resulting in passport alerts that can now be challenged to an administrative judge.