The issuance of passports is governed by the Passports Act (Cap. 164.[1]
In early 2004, Belize suffered a "passport crisis" due to a shortage of blank passports when a delivery from the country's United Kingdom-based passport supplier De La Rue was delayed. The Ministry of Home Affairs tried to handle the crisis by recalling unused passport blanks from Belizean diplomatic missions abroad, while newspapers urged those who did not immediately need passports to wait until September or October when the switchover to the new machine-readable passports would begin.[2] The problem came to an end in August, though delays in issuance of up to four weeks persisted.[3]
In 2009, Belize began issuing passports in the common CARICOM design, with additional security features such as intaglio printing of certain text, a guilloché pattern on the inside pages, and a "ghost image" on the biodata pages.[4]
Belize
