Tuesday is a holiday in the Czech Republic, but rather make it a long weekend by also taking Monday completely off, many families spent the day trying to get passports issued for their children in order to comply with new EU regulations soon to come into effect.
After June 26, children — including newborns — may no longer travel on their parents’ passports according to the new EU-wide ruling of one person, one passport. Applications can takes weeks to process.
Municipal clerks across the Czech Republic on Monday experienced an onslaught of applications for passports — a process complicated by the fact that photographing and fingerprinting young children and babies can be a challenge.
“Sometimes we have a child ready in 10 minutes, but sometimes it takes a half hour, and there are also cases where the parents have to come again, for example because the photo must be taken with the eyes open [and a baby may be napping],” one clerk from Přerov, north Moravia, told the news server Novinky.cz.
