The Henley Passport Index ranks Seychelles as twenty ninth out of 199 nations for the primary quarter of 2023 for the power of the nation’s passport holders to go to 153 nations visa free.
The index is ready by London-based Henley and Companions, a world citizenship and residence advisory agency.
The agency makes use of knowledge gathered from the Worldwide Air Transport Affiliation (IATA), which manages inter-airline cooperation globally.
As IATA gathers the knowledge in real-time, the index can be amended in the identical method as Henley and Companions additionally monitor any adjustments governments might impose on the passports and visa.
The newest figures present Seychelles is forward of Mauritius on the thirty fourth place the place passport holders can go to 146. South Africa got here in at 53rd place with its residents capable of go to 106 visa free locations and Kenya at 73rd with 73 nations.
Whereas the small island state’s passport continues to be faring higher than a lot of its different African counterparts, Seychelles has slipped down by one place from its rating of 2022.
The Seychelles – an archipelago within the Western Indian Ocean – additionally just lately modified its passport to a bio-metric one in November final 12 months, in a bid to make sure its security.
“It’s a passport that will likely be safe and it’ll not be simple for somebody to duplicate it,” President Wavel Ramkalawan had declared on the time of receiving his personal passport- which was additionally the primary issued.
The Henley index claims to be the “authentic rating of all of the world’s passports covers 227 locations and 199 passports and compares the visa-free entry of 199 totally different passports to 227 journey locations.”
To find out the passport’s rating, if no visa is required, then a rating with worth of 1 is created for that passport. The identical applies in case you can acquire a visa on arrival, a customer’s allow, or an digital journey authority (ETA) when coming into the vacation spot.
Based on the index, Japan is the nation with the strongest passport for the fifth 12 months working, with their residents with the ability to freely go to 193 locations.
Singapore and South Korea, whose residents can freely go to 192, are in second place.