15-17 February 2016
The WCO held a National Workshop on Advance Passenger Information (API) and Passenger Name Records (PNR) Systems in cooperation with the State Customs Committee of the Republic Azerbaijan (Customs Committee). The Workshop took place at the WCO Regional Training Center (RTC) in Baku, Azerbaijan and benefitted from funding support of the Customs Cooperation Fund (CCF) Germany. In The Workshop for 24 middle management officials of the Customs Committee, 1 official of Customs’ Partner Government Agency as well as 11 representatives of airline industries was facilitated by a WCO Expert and an expert from Turkish Customs on passenger information in general.
The Chief of Customs Control Head Department, Mr. Javad Gasimov delivered the opening remarks for the workshop. He shared that Azerbaijan aimed to further enhance specifically tourism and business investments. It would be the role of all government agencies including Customs to support such growth by appropriate facilitation of traveling. An approach of regulatory passenger handling at the airport utilizing advance passenger information would respectively contribute to more efficient and effective travel facilitation as well as control. In addition, a comprehensive risk management could be applied by linking passenger information with different sources of data, for instance data generated from express as well as postal shipments.
Throughout the workshop, the WCO facilitators shared information on the series of WCO instruments and tools that relate to the topics, including the API Guidelines, PNRGOV standards as well as the WCO Recommendation on the use of API and PNR for efficient and Customs Control. The Azerbaijan Customs Committee was invited to accept the Recommendation (June 2015 version) once its passenger system would be established. The Co-facilitator specifically shared practical experience of Turkish Customs in establishing their system. Workshop participants equally undertook several practical exercises to develop passenger risk profiles.
The workshop was closed by Mr. Jeyhun Najafli, Chief of Passenger Division. He thanked the WCO, the CCF Germany as well as Turkish Customs for organizing the Workshop, thus laying the ground for the establishment of the envisaged new system.