Romania’s Interior Minister Carmen Dan has announced that an amendment is being discussed to extend the validity of Romanian passports from five to ten years.

Carmen Dan said work is on to extend passport validity, but this will take some time because the system is short of hands and the workload is too high. In the past two-three months, the system has been processing as many as 11-12,000 applications a day.

“We cannot double the number of staff or counters. We can not set up a system just for extreme values. (...) In 16 counties and in Bucharest people are working overtime, without leaves and days off”, the Romanian interior minister said.