That's a fair point when dealing with such a large number of countries (and a widely varying stage of development between them). But the passport would have to be designed to adhere to ICAO standards in any case. That would make countries legally obliged to accept it as a valid travel document.
But that, in addition to all the other factors mentioned in the article, requires a lot of formalisation or written AU mandate - none of which has happened.
> designed to adhere to ICAO standards in any case. That would make countries legally obliged to accept it as a valid travel document
That can't be true. It is possible for private individuals to create documents that adhere to those specifications. In fact, some do but of course the documents are not accepted.
I stand corrected! So from what I read up, ICAO adherence only facililitates quicker processing at the entry point[0]. But member nations are not bound to anything.
So I previously thought that a country can obviously choose who it will accept with its own laws, but that it has to still recognise a valid travel document. That's obviously not true because there are many countries that refuse to recognise documents like the Israeli or Republic of China passports, despite them being perfectly standardised. Or the case of individually declared documents like the world passport or Liberland [1].
So in this case, the AU would have to formalise the status of the document in law, then member nations have to ratify it, before anyone should feel comfortable trying to travel on it. But of course, this isn't EU law that is generally well enforced; there's hardly anything stopping many African nations from flouting international, regional or even their very own set of laws! Hardly looking promising... It's just a shame there's so much wasted effort going in to this.
I guess they would only have to accept it if it was issued by a country that they recognize? And if the AU is not recognized as a country by other countries, they shouldn't have any obligation to accept the passport as a travel document?
