Immigration stuck with 1,500 passports

The Directorate of Citizenship and Immigration Control is stuck with 1,500 passports.

The passports were withdrawn from people that were placed in quarantine following the outbreak of COVID-19 in Uganda early this year.

The withdrawal of passports from returning Ugandans was one of the guidelines issued by the health ministry to control the spread of the virus.

"We were withdrawing them to enforce quarantine, but unfortunately many people have decided to leave them with us. We cannot afford to keep them because we are short of storage space," the spokesperson of the internal affairs ministry, Jacob Siminyu, said.

He said most of the holders were those that had traveled to 16 high-risk countries at the peak of the outbreak.

The countries included Italy, France, South Korea, China, the US, UK, Netherlands, and Switzerland.

Others were Sweden, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Norway Austria, Malaysia, Pakistan and San Marino. In 2008, the then internal affairs state minister, Matia Kasaija, said they had no option but to destroy over 50,000 passports after their owners failed to collect them.