KUALA LUMPUR: The Malaysian ePassport, has earned the Immigration Department the 2018 Regional ID Document of the Year Award.

Immigration director-general Datuk Seri Mustafar Ali and Datasonic executive director Steven Ng received the award in Hanoi on Tuesday.

The award was presented during the High-Security Printing Asia Global Conference 2018 held from Dec 3 to 5.

The ePassport was jointly developed by the department and Datasonic’s subsidiary, Datasonic Technologies Sdn Bhd.

“It is in recognition of the outstanding technical sophistication of a document and for promoting the best in system infra-structure and implementation of a government passport or identity card scheme,” Datasonic Group Berhad said in a statement.

Being the first in the world to develop and introduce the ePassport back in 1998, the new version launched in November 2017 has upgraded security features including an embedded chip in the polycarbonate personal particulars page.

The chip’s new position, as opposed to being in the back cover previously, makes the passport harder to forge and allows data to be read easily. — Bernama