Overseas travel: Right or privilege? Removing passports for offenders

THE ability to travel overseas on generally recognised and accepted documents is a benefit which seems to have been with us forever. It has been the engine of international tourism and all the attendant industries and businesses which depend upon it and grow from its fruits.

Frictionless passage between countries on the production of a “passport” — the word is French in origin, in reference to someone who could arrive and depart through a naval passage — has long ago been superceded by arrays of restrictions which would otherwise be impossible to manage.

Before the First World War, passports were unnecessary and, indeed, the speed of the rapidly emerging continental rail network appeared to make them unmanageable, but the arrival of the postmodern world and eventually mass aviation demanded greater controls. These were introduced through the League of Nations — a weaker version, if it is possible to believe that, of the United Nations — which was swept away in the passage towards the Second World War.