History
The nature of passports in Pre-Hispanic and Spanish-Era Philippines is generally unknown, and the earliest forms have been issued since the Philippines gained independence from the United States in 1946. Passports were ordered to be printed in Filipino for the first time under Diosdado Macapagal, to be subsequently implemented under Ferdinand Marcos. Currently, it is printed in Filipino with English translations.
With the adoption of the current constitution in 1987, the power of issuing passports was transferred from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the current Department of Foreign Affairs. The Philippine Passport Act 1996 governs the issuance of Philippine passports and travel documents. Philippine passports are only issued to citizens, while travel documents (under Section 13) may be issued to citizens who have lost their passports overseas as well as permanent residents who cannot obtain passports or travel documents from other countries.
On May 1, 1995, green covers were instituted on regular passports for the first time, and barcodes were inserted in passports in 2004. The new security-enhanced passport is a pre-requisite to the issuance of new machine-readable passports which was issued on September 17, 2007. The Philippines used to be one of the few countries in the world and formerly the only country in Southeast Asia that did not issue machine-readable regular passports, although machine-readable official passports have been issued since June 18, 2007.
Read more about this topic: Philippine Passport
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