Passport

District Court dismiss case against refugee

Magistrate Mekeo Gauli dismissed the case after lunch today because he was of the view that police prosecution did not prove it's case for the refugee to answer to.

He said a constitutional breach occurred during Sawari's arrest on February 3 because he was not accorded his rights under section 42 of the PNG Constitution before he was questioned for a recorded interview.

The passport which was used by Sawari to travel to Fiji on  January 20, 2017 was also not produced in evidence before court. This passport was vital in police prosecution's case.

New stringent process for travel documents

The authority will be making several changes to required accompanying documents to passport applications to ensure there are no falsified or misleading information.

In a public notice, Acting Chief Migration Officer, Solomon Kantha, says the changes were necessary due to the recent integrity issued concerning lodgment of applications for PNG passport by persons providing misleading or falsified information.

He said to address this, the following changes, which become effective as of March 01, have been made:

Sluggish sales continue for BlackBerry

The Canadian company sold only 1.1 million phones in its first quarter, a fall of 500,000 from the previous quarter. BlackBerry reported a loss of $28 million or 5 cents a share from revenues of $658 million.

This represents an improvement on last year’s numbers where for the same period under review, BlackBerry made a loss of $60 million, or 11 cents a share on revenues of $966 million.