August 24, 2010
More than 1,200 citizens abroad applied for new or renewed their Latvian passports in a project that brought mobile processing stations to the United States, Canada and Australia during July and early August, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has announced in Rīga.
The project was coordinated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of the Interior’s Office of Citizenship and Migration Affairs (Pilsonsības un migrācijas lietu pārvalde, or PMLP). It was designed to serve Latvian citizens abroad in advance of the Oct. 2 parliamentary election, especially those who live a great distance from Latvian embassies.
Although the effort did not serve the 1,800 citizens the ministries had expected, the project brought in LVL 67,000 in state and consular fees.
In all, 1,247 citizens were processed by representatives using the mobile passport stations. Of those, 709 were in the U.S., 346 in Australia and 192 in Canada.
Three pairs of representatives, with one from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and one from the PMLP, visited the three countries.
They brought with them a processing station that allowed the representatives to take passport photographs and to record fingerprints. In the U.S., the processing station was brought Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York and Seattle. In Canada, the representatives visited Edmonton, Toronto and Vancouver. Australian cities visited were Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney.
