Immigration: EU Nationals

(asked on 20th February 2019) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps he is taking to tackle the issue of the official name of Bulgarian citizens appearing in Cyrillic on their EU settled status applications as a result of the first line of their passport being written in the Cyrillic script.


Answered by
Caroline Nokes Portrait
Caroline Nokes
This question was answered on 1st March 2019

The EU Settlement Scheme is streamlined, user-friendly and will be accessible to all prospective applicants. To provide a simple user experience and to increase data accuracy, we use technology to read data direct from the passport Machine Readable Zone (MRZ) the text at the bottom of a passport and the passport chip.

Neither the MRZ nor the chip in the document include special characters such as Cyrillic script. This is in line with International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) standard for passports that all EU passports adhere to. The ICAO standard provides translation matrices for each marking to the English alphabet, and it is intended that the digital status shown to individuals will follow the same format and display names in Latin script only. However, in some cases, we are aware that Cyrillic characters are appearing within the digital status name, and we are investigating why this is happening so that this can be rectified.

The test phases have provided us with a useful opportunity to prove various elements of the scheme functionality and we continue to refine the handling of special characters, including how this could apply retrospectively to any applicants who may want their data to be corrected

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