As a long time lurker (two years plus, which may be some kind of record… but probably not), I’ve enjoyed coming here daily to read the boards and generally consider myself all the more enlightened and entertained by the experience.
Indeed, the number of times someone here has posted something which has caused me to spray coffee all over my monitor in laughter is one of the many reasons I’m taking the plunge and registering…
Anyway, about 10 years ago I was reading a certain periodical- published by a certain well-known smoking-jacked wearing gentleman, and containing a number of well-written articles and, shall we say, uplifting pictorials- when I came across (bad choice of words, I know… :smack: ) an article about a company that specialised in providing passports for countries that don’t exist anymore or have changed their names.
The rationale behind this was that if you were a contractor or whatever working in West Africa, or perhaps some of the less civilised parts of Asia or the Middle East, it might be expedient to have a “Backup” passport in the event of a Civil War, Rebel Insurrection, or corrupt government official trying to extort bribes off you. That way, if someone took your “Backup” passport and did a runner with it/held it for ransom, you still had your real passport to wave at the nearest embassy in the hope they could squeeze you onto the last flight out of the country or at least hide you somewhere until the shooting stopped or the Red Cross got there, whichever happened first.
As someone who’s travelled a fair bit himself (although not to anywhere I’m likely to be caught in the crossfire between Government Troops and various Rebel Factions with initials that don’t match up with their name in any known language), I wondered out of idle curiosity if this was even legal, and more importantly, how useful this might be in real life.
I mean, the immigration people at Heathrow Airport are likely to drag you off to a small room with no windows for a friendly chat if you tried gaining entry to the UK using a passport from Portuguese Guinea (especially if you don’t speak Portuguese), but is someone on the border between Angola and the Congo likely to know that there’s no such place as British Honduras anymore?
You have to admit there’s a certain James Bond-esque quality about having a bunch of passports from different countries (all presumably with different names in them, just so you don’t get the government of Mali chasing you up when you get home for attempting to bribe the border guards), but I’m not sure the risks (that you’d find a border guard in some out of the way 3rd world country with a 92% illiteracy rate whose hobby is reading National Geographics in his spare time, and knows full well that Tasmania isn’t allowed to issue it’s own passports) outweigh the advantages (That when a border guard in some out of the way 3rd world country with a 92% illiteracy rate confiscates your passport for not bribing him, it’s not going to mean you’re stuck there until you pay him enough to buy every goat in the country and maybe some of the chickens in the neighbouring republic.)
Anyway, to get to the point: Is it legal to issue passports for places that don’t exist anymore (e.g. British Honduras, Belgian Congo, French Indochina) or couldn’t normally issue their own passports (e.g. Tasmania, Scotland, North Dakota), and assuming it was legal, how useful would it be (besides the novelty value)?
But as you mentioned I would not try using it at Heathrow.
