First of all, you need a passport. But the glorious Turkish State has some difficulties to issue new passports. Because of the Armenian Genocide Bill issue in France, Turkish leaders seemed to have acted for the least damaging manner and canceled the agreement with the French company that produces new passports. Of course the pseudo-Sultan and his entourage has no problems with passports, so he could let it do that… I hear that Turkey now works with the same French company who in turn had sued Turkey for the cancellation of the previous contract.
By canceling the contract, Turkey could not issue new passports for the new applicants since the beginning of summer. With the new agreement, the passports are issued, but instead of a few days, new applicants might wait for 3 weeks or more.
I heard this story before but I thought I was lucky as my passport was valid until 2015. In fact, due to visa and other issues, I don’t even go to Europe for a while. But Kai Ekholm (chair of Committee on Free Access to Information and Freedom of Expression (FAIFE)) was so nice to invite me to a great session (http://conference.ifla.org/ifla78/session-75) I could not refuse. So I decided to move this time on time- in fact I missed another event in the beginning of summer, because i was late to apply for UK visa… and while I was about to apply for Finland visa…
HOWEVER, my passport was an old one and in the last minute, I learnt that no Schengen Visas are issues for the older ones. So I had to apply for the new one and start an ordeal… to be continued.
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