What passport is generally accepted by the fewest countries. A few possibilities come to mind Iroquois, North Korean, Zealandian. I don’t have any real numbers though. Another thought on how it could be answered is a passport which lets you enter without visa into the fewest countries.
South Africa set up four “independent” homeland republics inside South Africa: Bophuthatswana, Ciskei, Transkei, and Venda. The only countries that recognized them as nations were South Africa and each other.
All four “nations” were incorporated back into South Africa in 1994.
How about a passport from Sealand? That’s got to be pretty worthless (in terms of travel).
Zev Steinhardt
Bolding mine.
A New Zealand passport gives visa-free access to over 170 countries and territories.
There’s any number of micronations that exist or existed for a time (Wikipedia has a list). Some of them are jokes; some have a slightly more serious purpose, but very few of them exercise meaningful control over any territory. Many of them have issued passports, usually for the purposes of publicity or revenue-raising. These passports are functionally useless. You could quibble, though, over whether these documents are passports at all, any more than Monopoly money is money.
If we confine ourselves to states that actually exist in the sense of controlling territory or appearing to, the most useless passports are those issued by the states with the most limited international recognition. There’s a bunch of Russian-sponsored states in the Caucasus that declared independence in the early 1990s when the Soviet Union disintegrated - South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia, Transnistria. Russia recognises some of them, mainly to piss off other Soviet successor states in the region like Moldova and Georgia. Otherwise, they are pretty much recognised only by one another. To be honest, I’m not sure how functional they still are, but I wouldn’t like to have a passport issued by one of these as my only travel document.
The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is recognised only by Turkey, and I’m not sure how useful its passports are for visiting anywhere that isn’t Turkey. The Republic of Cyprus regards TRNC territory as beloning to it, and everyone born there as a citizen of the Republic of Cyprus, and will issue them with passports, and I think most North Cypriots who travel do so on RoC passports.
Tonga will give a “protected person passport” to anyone with the money to buy one. I don’t think it offers visa-free travel anywhere, and many countries don’t recognize it at all. You can’t even enter Tonga with it.
It’s not cheap, so there must be some benefit to it or else nobody would buy it, but I don’t think it would be useful at all for an ordinary person.
Actually, North Korean would be one of the MOST useful. It is the only one that will get a North Korean out of North Korea.
I met a Moldovan girl on the bus from Galati to Chisinau, she said she has both a Romanian and a Moldovan passport. She is very proud of her Moldovan passport and uses it whenver possible, but often has to use her Romanian passport for convenience when traveling abroad.
Most people from obscure countries have another passport of convenience, if they travel a lot.
I suspect that may need to be put the other way around.
“People from obscure countries may only be able to travel a lot if they’re able to obtain a passport of convenience.”
who said New Zealand http://mw.micronation.org/wiki/Zealandian_Passport
Zealandia is a animal/nature preserve ? (that’s all I found on the place its self )
Zealandia is a micronation so insignificant that it hasn’t yet made it to the Wikipedia list of micronations. According to this article it claims about 9 sq
Zealandia is a micronation so insigfnicant that it hasn’t yet made it to the Wikipedia list of micronations. According to this article it claims about 9 sq km of territory, but it’s not entirely clear where that territory is. Its websiteseems to be inactive, so good luck with your passport application!
(Perhaps the most useless passport is the one you can’t get in the first place?)
Wouldn’t that be the only thing it would be useful for?
Sounds like a good start though…
According to this site (Passport Index[sup]TM[/sup]), Afghanistan “wins.” North Korea does surprisingly well. The “weakest” passports appear to be concentrated in Africa and Asia.
Probably because ordinary North Koreans can’t get passports, so the only people with them are (relative) elites. North Korea filters out the people most likely to settle illegally on their end.
Passports can be a real pain in the ass for people from countries with little clout. My Canadian wife had to get a new passport when we were living in a country that had no Canadian representation. For no other reason than that she had used up all her visa pages. The British embassy agreed to carry her passport in a diplomatic pouch to an unsafe country where a civil was was going on, in order to get additional pages affixed by the Canadian consul.
And that pales, in comparison to a white girl I met in Bolivia, whose Zimabwean passport was stolen, and she had been stuck in Bolivia for months with no reasonable prospects that the difficulty would ever be resolved, and no embassies feeling obliged to help, and the nearest Zimbabwean consul in London, with little sympathy for the few remaining white settlers after independence.
Wouldn’t Bolivia eventually deport her (for being illegally there), presumably to Zimbabwe?
I have no idea, I did not have an in depth conversation with her about it. But a country can’t just deport somebody by taking them to the border and dropping them off in no-man’s land. You have to go through a formal legal procedure of deportation, with a compelling justification for doing so, and then incur the cost of transporting the subject to a country willing to admit them. Bolivia has the discretion to keep on extending her tourist visa under unusual circumstances. She has committed no willful crime there. In a sense, it like some German tourists I knew who were in a car accident in Jordan, and one of them was in the hospital for almost a year, well beyond their visa expiration.
How about North Cyprus? That would only get you into Turkey and home again.