IN AN effort to expedite procedures at airports and ports, the government has removed around 22,000 names from the island’s dated stop list, the Immigration Department said yesterday.
Around 69,000 names had amassed on the list. Some go back to the days of the Eoka struggle in 1955, while some of the people on the list have died.
The decision to take names off the list came after Interior Minister Christodoulos Christodoulou appointed an ad hoc committee to address the problem.
The committee has initially decided to take around 22,000 names off the list, but Immigration Department Director Andreas Aristidou yesterday told the Cyprus Mail they were still going through the list taking out names.
Aristidou said the main reason why the list was so long was that in the past, when police wanted to find out if someone had left or entered the island, their name would go on the alert list, which is part of the stop list. No one then bothered to remove it after the job was done.
But it was not only the police who added names on to the list.
The same method was used by the army and social services, and even people who had lost their passports where among the 69,000, Aristidou said.
The list was also full of Cypriots who had committed petty offences. This group has been removed and only those with court orders pending against them remain.
Aristidou said around 80 per cent of the names on the list were those of foreigners wanted for crimes ranging from illegal entry to murder.
The reduced list will expedite checks at the points of entry and exit, thus making life easier for both officers and travellers, Aristidou said.
Processing would be even faster in the near feature, once the immigration service is equipped with a new system, he added.
Apart from being overloaded, he said the current system was cumbersome and time-consuming, and travellers — especially incoming — sometimes had to wait while an immigration officer combed through hundreds of people with the same name.
EU nationals travelling to Cyprus are not submitted to any checks unless police have specific information on them.
