How should the ESTA question "Have you ever been issued a passport or ID for travel by any other country?" be understood?
- By
- Aparna Patel
- |
- 20 Jul, 2023
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A passport issued in Australia is not necessarily issued by Australia. The key part of the question is “by any other country.” Another passport issued by the same country doesn’t count, regardless of when or where it was issued.
If you and your husband have both held only French nationality then all your passports and national ID cards have been issued by France, and your answer to this question should be no.
Although this implies that your husband answered the question incorrectly, he probably should not apply for a new ESTA. Incorrect answers that disclose extra information are not particularly troubling because they are not deceptive.
(Anyone who is in the opposite circumstances should probably submit a new application, however, because willfully omitting information that should have been included is deceptive; the omission could therefore lead to trouble; and disclosing the information on your own initiative is the best way to show that the earlier omission was not willful.)
A simplified version of the question would be:
Have you ever been issued a passport by any other country?
This should be easier to answer. It sounds like in your case, where you are French citizens and have only ever been French citizens, the answer would be no. (If your husband was issued a French passport in Australia, that would not count as a different country. If he was issued an Australian passport, because he became an Australian citizen, that would be entirely different.)
The reason the “or ID for travel” is also in the question is because there are other kinds of documents (such as those issued to refugees) which are generically called “travel documents”. These are documents that you could use for international travel in lieu of a passport.
Credit:stackoverflow.com‘