PM Briceno to Address Fake Birth Certificate Scandal

With the Prime Minister now back at home there are some pressing national issues that he will have to address.  Among those are the matter of the fraudulent birth certificates that were reportedly issued back in June this year for a reported cost of five thousand US dollars each.  With those fake papers, at least two American nationals were able to obtain a social security card and a passport.  Speaking as the PM and the minister responsible for immigration, Briceno explained how the investigation came about.

John Briceño, Prime Minister of Belize: “What happened is that it seems that, I don’t know how long ago if a few weeks or a few months ago, a batch of birth certificates were either stolen or given out to somebody and now those are starting to surface. Now there was a series of numbers that is said that were disappeared and what we did was the passport department has been in full alert to ensure that those do not appear, and so is social security. Now, what has happened it seems that they have not taken these and changed the numbers. Someone managed to change these numbers and so a few have slipped by. A few have been caught and they’ve called the police on them. What we’re doing with the attorney general who’s in charge of the Vital Statistical Unit, VSU, they are doing now a full investigation. They think that they have a few leads as to who are the people that are responsible. I want to assure the Belizean people that we’re doing everything possible to protect the whole issue about our nationality and that anybody that’s found with a false birth certificate that they are going to be prosecuted to the fullest and to ensure that does not happen. But what’s so, I think people are saying, so what are you doing about it? Well, we’re talking a number of issues. The most important thing is that we’re digitizing the vital statistics unit so that in the future as soon as you’re born from the hospital they’re going to enter it into the system and so you will be automatically registered. And then whenever you want a copy then you apply through the system and then a copy is printed out for you. So it’s no longer that you can look up on these books or these….all in the system. And we believe that it’s going to better protect the whole issue of your….. it could better be able to protect our nationality and make sure that the people that have these birth certificates are Belizeans, are our citizens that truly deserve a birth certificate.”

In its release issued on Tuesday, the Office of the Attorney General indicated that the birth certificates were not generated at the Vital Statistics Office as IT personnel had gone in to conduct a scrub of the documents.