Castries, St Lucia – Prime Minister Stephenson King said today that nationals of St Lucia and Dominica wishing to travel to the United Kingdom will not be required to obtain a visa, but would need to be in possession of a machine readable passport by mid-2012.
King, flanked at a news conference by his National Security Minister Guy Mayers and a British government representative, said his administration was working towards meeting the 2012 deadline for the complete elimination of hand written travel documents.
Just over a year ago, London announced plans for a waiver visa test for St Lucia and Dominica assessing the risks nationals of these two Eastern Caribbean countries posed to the United Kingdom in terms of illegal immigration, crime and security.
The former labour administration had written to both governments on the issue indicating that nationals from St. Lucia and Dominica had been identified as posing a sufficiently high risk so as to warrant in principle, a visa requirement for entry into the United Kingdom.
“The British government was very forceful on the need for us to remove out of circulation the hand-written passports and to ensure machine readable documents are available by a particular time,” King told reporters.
“We have been working in that regard for sometime and we have given a firm commitment in terms of deadlines, we are meeting those deadlines by which all St. Lucians should have a machine readable passport by the middle of 2012” he said. (CMC)
