Singapore could boast of not just some of the smartest, best educated kids in the world, but also some of the smartest, best educated law-enforcement officers, civil servants and technology experts in the world.
Together, they redesigned Singapore's entire system for the issuance of identity documents, creating an entirely new ID document numbering system that would prevent Singaporeans from being falsely detained or arrested if their own passports were stolen, and that would allow Singapore to follow Switzerland's lead.
Singapore educated and trained its police and immigration officers on how best to use Interpol's databases and technology to detect stolen passports and yet avoid long queues at entry checkpoints.
It then began to systematically screen the passports of all those crossing its borders, preventing those with stolen passports from entering.
As a result, Singapore now ranks No. 3 in the world, in terms of passport screening, after only the United States and Britain - countries with populations 12 to 60 times larger than Singapore's.
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In November last year, after the Paris terror attacks, the European Union's Justice and Home Affairs ministers made a common decision that, by March this year, passport screening against Interpol's stolen passport database would be implemented at all of the EU's external borders.
Singapore made this same decision, not because of a terrorist attack on its soil, but because its law-enforcement officers studied the experiences of other countries, learnt the lessons, and applied them to the real-world threat.
By Ronald K. Noble
The writer was Interpol Secretary General from 2000-2014 and is also the founder of RKN Global, a security solutions provider.
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