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Starting with January 18th, all police stations in Croatia started issuing biometric passports. These new passports have a changed visual identity and contain an RFID chip with a personal data carrier, digitalized facial image and indexes of two finger prints.

Aside from the higher level of protection, the not so good news for Croatian citizens is that the new passport in the regular process will cost Croatian citizens twice more than the "old" passports. The new price is 320 kn plus an administrative fee of 70 kn for regular issuing process. For urgent procedure, citizens will have to pay the cost of 420 kn and 220 kn of administrative fees, said the Director of Administration and Inspection in the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MUP), Žarko Katić.

Old passports will be valid until their expiry date. Even though current requirements do not state that Croatian citizens must get the new passport, once the United States decide to abolish visa requirements for Croatian citizens, it will not be possible to come in to the United States without a biometric passport.

Croatian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MUP) is hoping that there will not be crowds at the counters for issuing new passports. Another change is that now citizens can apply at any police station for the issuing of their passport, and not only in their place of residence.

MUP started issuing the first biometric passports in June, but only at the police station in Petrinjska street in Zagreb. By the end of 2009, they issued 3847 biometric passport, which is very few considering that they issue around 300,000 passports per year.

Chief of the Cabinet of Ministry of Internal Affairs, Dubravko Novak, said that it will be virtually impossible to counterfeit the new passport. It is impossible to change the data in the chip so if citizens will need to change their personal data on the passport, they will simply have to get a new passport.

Moreover, the personal data is written on the chip in a strictly defined and safe manner, and the chip is invisible to the user because it is located within a multi-layered page with information about the owner, made of specific polymer materials - polycarbonates.

Once citizens decide to get a new passport, they will not have to fill out the data forms anymore, but the data will be automatically retrieved from the MUP information system.

After France and Germany, Croatia is the third country to introduce the second generation biometric passports. The first generation passports had biographical data stored on them, while the second generation has facial image and fingerprints as well.

Old passports will still be issued in diplomatic missions and consular offices that have not secured the technical requirements for issuing the biometric passports. But the police say that they are in haste to enable all sites for issuing the new, biometric passports.