What Is A National I.D System?

People's National Party's (PNP) President, Dr Peter Phillips says, the midnight amendments to the National Identification System Bill, which were introduced in a marathon session in the Senate on Friday, further underscores the need for the Bill to be sent before a joint select committee where all the contentious issues can be hammered out.

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.....China is starting significant reform of one of the most restrictive policies dating back to the Mao era.

The Hukou is an internal passport which classes people as either rural or urban. It's probably the largest social engineering project in the world.

For the rest of their lives people can only go to school, university and settle down in the place they were first registered. Unless they can pay their way out of it.

Based on the old soviet system which separated farm workers from town and city dwellers; the household registration was designed to ensure agricultural production and, to some extent, political stability.

Now China's new leaders are pushing significant new economic reforms which are expected include historic reform of the Hukou system.

China's financial capital, Shanghai, announced this week new rules which would allow people from the countryside to move into the city and enjoy the same benefits, the same access to schools and welfare.

Far above the ground and far from home. Window cleaner Zhao Fei came to Beijing to find work. He's a migrant worker, and so finds himself treated as an immigrant in his own country.

He was born in a rural province, so China's Hukou system prevents him settling in a city.

As he dangles from a rope hanging down the side of a glass clad skyscraper in China's capital, I speak to him through an open window. He tells me state bureaucracy makes him an outsider.

"There's nothing for me in Beijing, I'm like a stranger, a passer-by".

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MOSCOW — As of last Friday, I am an undocumented person in my own country. I cannot open or close a bank account, receive medical care at a state clinic, buy a cellphone, return a purchase to a store or enter into a contract, which my job requires me to do several times a day. All of these operations and many more require a valid internal passport, a peculiar document that may be the most significant vestige of the U.S.S.R. in modern Russian society.

Back when we lived behind the Iron Curtain, these passports entitled us to travel only within the confines of the Soviet Union. Anyone lucky enough to be allowed to travel abroad was issued a special foreign-travel passport just for the occasion and had to surrender it upon returning home. When Russians acquired the right to travel freely, they got to keep their foreign-travel passports. But the internal passport refused to die. So now each adult Russian citizen has two passports. The documents look alike, except that the one for internal use is printed on lighter paper stock, making it feel less substantial.

The internal passport may sound like the identity document that citizens of many European countries are required to hold, but none of those are as comprehensive or as intrusive.

Pages 2 and 3 contain issuing information and the bearer’s name, date and place of birth. This is standard fare.

Pages 4 through 11 are reserved for stamps certifying the bearer’s legal right to reside at a particular address. In Soviet times, this was as close as most citizens got to having property rights: The state issued residential quarters and then, with a stamp in the passport, certified the person’s right to live there. Now, the old residence-permit system and the new private-property system exist side by side. One can purchase an apartment and be denied the legal right to reside in it. Or one can retain the legal right to live on a property that belongs to someone else.

Pages 12 and 13 are marked “Military Duty.” All Russian males and a fair number of the females (those who studied foreign languages and could serve as translators) are subject to mandatory military service. A man under 29 whose passport does not reflect that he has either carried out or been released from his military service may be detained by any policeman and delivered to a draft office to be shipped off. This happens often enough.

Pages 14 and 15 are reserved for marital status. Upon marrying or divorcing, one acquires a corresponding stamp. Pages 16 and 17 are where the names of one’s children go — as long as they are under 14, whereupon they have to get their own internal passports.

The last two pages of the passport contain information on one’s foreign-travel passport, as well as, optionally, one’s blood type.

Every time I initiate a bank transaction in person, return an item to a store or enter into a contract, I share all of this personal information with perfect strangers.

Or shared. Last Friday I turned 45, and my internal passport expired. One gets one’s first internal passport at 14 and turns it in for a new one at 20 and then again, as a government Web site puts it, “in case one reaches the age of 45” — a simple reminder of the fact that a lot of Russians don’t. When I do get my new passport, I am expected to carry it for the rest of my life, probably because the government doesn’t expect that to be a very long time.

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Chinese authorities’ use of a two-track system for issuing passports has severely restricted the freedom of movement for virtually all residents of areas populated mainly by religious minorities, Human Rights Watch said in a new report today. China’s discriminatory double-tiered passport system requires residents of those areas to provide far more extensive documentation than other citizens. Additional restrictions in place in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) since 2012 have led to a near-total ban on any foreign travel by residents of that region, except those on government business.

“Chinese authorities should move swiftly to dismantle this blatantly discriminatory passport system,” said Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch. “The restrictions also violate freedom of belief by denying or limiting religious minorities’ ability to participate in pilgrimages outside China.”

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Imagine being tied to one address for your entire life, and that leaving – even for a weekend – would mean fending for yourself in the wild, with no guaranteed access to food or shelter.

Draconian as it may sound, in the years following 1958, when China’s ‘internal passport’ system was formally introduced, the hukou worked in a similar fashion, providing certain entitlements for survival that were only accessible at one’s home base.

If you were born in the countryside, an agricultural hukou entitled you to a plot of land that you were expected to till for subsistence. If you were born into an urban household, the state set you up with a work unit or danwei, which provided you with a house, food, healthcare and education.

Everything revolved around the address stamped in your hukou book, including, in some sense, your identity.

“I think during the first decades of the communist era, the government really did have this attitude like it was going to take responsibility for all of the citizens of China, to make sure that they were fed and had welfare guarantees, and it was going to do this through the hukousystem,” explains Joel Andreas, professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University.

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An internal passport is an identity document that may or may not be used by a country to control and monitor the internal movement and residence of its people. When passports first emerged, there was no clear distinction between internal and international ones. Later, some countries developed sophisticated systems of passports for various purposes and various groups of population. Uses for internal passports have included restricting citizens of a subdivided state to employment in their own area (preventing their migration to richer cities or regions), clearly recording the ethnicity of citizens to enforce segregation or prevent passing, and controlling access to sensitive sites or closed cities.

Currently, only Russia is known to still have internal passports as a part of their bureaucratic heritage but do not use them to restrict the movement of people. In such countries, internal passport are essentially identification documents in booklet form.

Countries that currently have internal passports include:

• Russian Federation (Russian internal passport)

Internal passports are known to have been issued and used previously by:

• Russian Empire and its successor states,
• France,
• Confederate States of America,
• Soviet Union (see Soviet Union internal passport)
• Ottoman Empire,
• South Africa, during apartheid,
• China,
• Iraq (until 2016, replaced by National Card), and
• Ukraine (until 2016, see Ukrainian internal passport)[1]

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.... In France, in the past, one had to show an internal passport to change city. Former convicts who had served forced labour, even after having served their sentence, had a yellow passport, which made them outcasts. A famous holder of the yellow passport is the former bagnard Jean Valjean the hero of the novel by Victor Hugo.[3]

A décret issued 2 October 1795 (10 Vendémiaire year IV in the French Republican Calendar) required all persons traveling outside the limits of their canton to possess either an internal passport (for voyages within France) or external passport (for travel outside France). In 1815 an internal passport cost 2 francs and was delivered by the mayor of the commune to the residence of the passport requester.[4]:19 Internal passports were significantly easier to obtain than passports for foreign travel, which cost 10 francs in 1815. In the early 19th century, many emigrants obtained cheaper and easier-to-obtain internal passports to travel to the port of Havre, from which most ships to America departed.[4]:19, 23–26 As control of the issuance of internal passports, which required a certificate of good behavior, was in the hands of the mayors of communes, there was some degree of favoritism in the issuance/denial of internal passports in the 18th century.[4]:23–24

Booklet and notebook of circulation of travellers[edit]

This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (April 2013)
In France, the "livret de circulation" (booklet of circulation) and its variant the "carnet de circulation" (notebook of circulation) provided to those of no fixed abode were particularly constraining and discriminatory obligations imposed on itinerants.

At the end of 2012, when examining a priority question of constitutionality[fr], the Constitutional Council ended the notebook of circulation, considering that it harmed disproportionately the freedom of movement.

South Africa[edit]
In South Africa, the pass laws (notably the Pass Laws Act 1952, which applied until 1986) were a component of the apartheid system. The laws regulated where, when and for how long persons could remain outside their “homeland” — which, for many people, was not their homeland, so thousands of autochthon people were forced to change region. These laws also made it compulsory for all black South Africans over the age of 15 to carry a pass book at all times. However, the legislation also required that citizens of all races have on their person an ID book, which closely approximates a passport.

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