Belgium has begun issuing a new, high-security “attestation d’immatriculation” (AI) to people who have applied for a residence permit or international protection but have not yet received a full residence card. Production started on Monday 28 September, marking the first overhaul of the paper ‘orange card’ in more than two decades. The new document is printed on the same polycarbonate material used for Belgian ID cards and passports and is embedded with tactile micro-text, holograms and a contactless chip. Each certificate is assigned a unique serial number that can be checked instantly against a central database shared by the Immigration Office, police and local communes. Lost, stolen or invalidated certificates will therefore appear as such during an identity check, closing a loophole that has long facilitated document fraud. Interior Minister Bernard Quintin said the reform “moves us from a paper document that can easily be forged to a secure document that is centrally registered and can be verified in real time.” Asylum and Migration Minister Anneleen Van Bossuyt added that digitalisation will lighten the administrative workload for communes and speed up background checks, helping frontline officers distinguish genuine applicants from fraudsters more quickly. For employers and global mobility managers, the change means that foreign staff waiting for a residence card will now hold a machine-readable certificate whose validity can be confirmed online. HR departments are advised to update onboarding procedures and to train compliance teams to recognise the new AI, especially when verifying right-to-work during pre-employment checks. Business travellers who need to open bank accounts, sign leases or undergo security vetting should find the new certificate more readily accepted than the old orange paper. The roll-out dovetails with wider EU efforts to tighten identity security ahead of next year’s implementation of the European Migration & Asylum Pact and Belgium’s own modernisation of municipal population registers. Existing orange certificates will remain valid until their expiry but will be replaced with the new secure version upon renewal.
Source: The Brussels Times
