There is no need to fear that a law seeking to collect information on travellers will criminalise anyone.
The proposed law, said Minister of Home Affairs Gregory Nicholls, is to protect Barbados’ borders and respond to threats.
The Advance Passenger Information and Passenger Name Record Bill, 2026, which was debated in the House of Assembly last week, was eventually passed in the Senate yesterday.
Nicholls, who piloted the Bill, said it represented a significant enhancement of national border security apparatus and immigration security.
It makes provision for the “collection, transmission, processing, and the sharing of advanced passenger information between Barbados and our partners within the regional security network, as well as our international partners”.
Passenger name record (PNR) data will be collected on those travelling by air and sea in and out of the country and, said Nicholls, the process was not new, as a framework for advanced passenger information sharing has been in place since 2007 when the Caribbean hosted the ICC World Cup. The latest law is a single statutory framework that goes beyond the specific concerns of the
Immigration Act to consolidate border security protection.
“This aligns Barbados with many international standards under the International Civil Aviation Convention, and certainly as it relates particularly to the passenger name record framework, the International Maritime Organisation and INTERPOL.
“It cannot be denied that in the contemporary environment that we live in, we can no longer depend on securing our borders when people arrive at them. Border management will require us to act long before people arrive in Barbados. This requires advanced intelligence, electronic data exchanges, risk assessments based on the information gathered, and timely identification of threats long before they arrive,” Nicholls said.
It is important for the country to know whether travellers posed a risk to Barbados, its border security and public safety “and to allow us to be able to respond to the challenges before these threats reach our border,” Nicholls told the Senate.
The Barbados Immigration Department and other security agencies were participating in “robust discussion” on enhancing border security as the movement of people across borders had become more fluid, faster, complex and interconnected, Nicholls pointed out. (AC)
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