europe

New identity documents are devised to defy counterfeiters by Liw Magazine

Steven Paulikas

At first glance, travel documents appear to be the most benign of objects. Sporting merely a photo here and a few stamps there, a passport seems nothing more than a bland collection of official papers whose most redeeming feature is that it gets its owner from one place to another. But behind the deceptively innocuous passport cover lies an entire world of historic and modern-day struggles to make sense of the world, and the people in it. For Lithuanians, the right to hold a passport not issued by a foreign government was just an abstract dream 15 years ago. And even in its short history, the contemporary Lithuanian passport has been transformed from a proud symbol of …