News
Online visa: Immigration Dept only partly complies with SC order; visa issuance activated and deactivated
View(s):By Namini Wijedasa
The Department of Immigration and Emigration has only partly complied with an August 2 Supreme Court interim order related to its controversial new e-visa mechanism.
The court suspended the contract that allowed a tripartite foreign consortium to process Sri Lankan online visas, but the department failed to revert to the previous electronic travel authorisation (ETA) system, thereby leaving online visa issuance in limbo.
Separately, the department—after notifying the Foreign Ministry that tourists and business visas could be issued through Sri Lanka’s overseas missions till online visa issuance was sorted out—activated and deactivated that facility twice in as many days, without explanation. It is no longer available. On-arrival tourist and business visas are currently the only option for travellers to
Sri Lanka.
Several of the missions this week officially complained, saying they are getting enquiries and in-person requests but are unable to entertain them. The missions include Sri Lanka’s High Commission in London, which wrote to President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s office saying it was in an embarrassing position and that the diaspora “have already expressed concerns in this regard, particularly highlighting this is an effort to prevent them from visiting the country at the time of elections.”
Now, three parties that petitioned the SC against the controversial agreement—Parliamentarians Patali Champika Ranawaka, Rauf Hakeem and M. A. Sumanthiran—say they are drawing up the paperwork for contempt of court. “This is unnecessary confusion amounting to deliberate sabotage by the Immigration Department,” Mr. Hakeem said.
Separately, all six of Sri Lanka’s leading tourism sector associations have notified the Controller General (CG) of Immigration that, should he fail to comply with the interim order, they will report him to the SC, “in addition to whatever other contempt proceedings that we may decide to institute against you.”
The Sri Lanka Association of Inbound Tour Operators, the Hotels Association of Sri Lanka, the Association of Small and Medium Enterprises in Tourism, the Sri Lanka Association of Professional Conference Exhibition & Event Organisers, the Sri Lanka Tourism Alliance, and the Ceylon Hotel School Graduates Association have told the Controller General that his “undue delay, directly occasioned by you, as well as other respondents, is resulting in tourism bookings being directed to other destinations, to the severe detriment of Sri Lanka, and the destruction of Sri Lanka’s legitimate need to solicit as many tourists as possible and to augment its foreign reserves.”
On August 2, Justices P. Padman Surasena (presiding), Kumudini Wickremasinghe and Achala Wengappuli suspended the Cabinet decision to award the outsourcing agreement between the department and the Singapore-registered GBS Technology Services, the UAE-registered IVS Global-FZCO and the Dubai-headquartered VFS VF Worldwide Holdings Ltd. The department was directed to maintain the status quo ante as of April 16 this year before the new VFS mechanism came into place.
Prior to this date, SLTMobitel ran the ETA system for two categories of visas. But Public Security Minister Tiran Alles and Controller General Harsha Ilukpitiya say they cannot revert to that system because regulations were promulgated in November last year, raising the number of visa categories to nearly 20. Various technical changes were made to give practical application to this.
Mr. Ilukpitiya told the Sunday Times he would seek the Attorney General’s advice on whether the department could legally revert to the status quo before April 16, disregarding the new regulations passed in Parliament. He expects a development by mid-next week. Minister Alles rejected charges that there was contempt of court or sabotage and said he, too, was awaiting the AG’s instructions.
SLTMobitel was abruptly ordered to stop ETA operations in April, clearing the path for the VFS-led consortium to run an e-visa service. SLTMobitel last week wrote to Mr. Ilukpitiya, saying it could restore the ETA front-end system within 24 hours if his department instructed Informatics International Ltd. (the entity that works with the department’s IT division) to provide the same backend services, the same network configuration, and other facilities that prevailed as of April 16 this year.
IT experts confirmed that, while the Controller General has instructed Informatics to provide SLTMobitel with access to the previous immigration backend systems, Informatics had developed new links for the VFS system, rendering the old ones incompatible. Immigration needs to instruct Informatics to reactivate the previous XML-type links that were used to integrate with SLTMobitel until April 2024.
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