The announcement was made in the presence of the minister for internal administration, Constança Urbano de Sousa, after a ceremony to mark the service’s 40 years of existence.
“At the start of next year we shall have a new passport with new security features, but it will not imply any additional cost,” the minister told journalists.
Citizens will only be required to apply for one of the new passports when their current one expires, she said. While the current model of passport is “very secure”, she noted, it was introduced a decade ago - since when there has been what she described as “monumental change” in technology in the field.
During the ceremony the SEF’s national director, Luísa Maia Gonçalves, announced that starting from July, citizens of nine more nationalities will be able to use the RAPID automatic identification system at the country’s frontiers: the US, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Venezuela, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and New Zealand.
At present only adult European Union citizens can use these automatic channels. Citizens of the nine countries that will now be eligible are among those that do not need visas to enter Portugal and have “so-called no-risk nationalities”.