DThe doctoral title moves to a different place on the identity card and passport. Until now it was in front of the last name, but in response to “international customs” it will now change to a data field on the back of the documents. This emerges from a regulation from the Federal Ministry of the Interior, which is available to the “Rheinische Post”.
When asked, the parliamentary director of the Greens, Irene Mihalic, confirmed the “Saarbrücker Zeitung” reported the project. The regulation takes up “a central part of our green criticism” and eliminates misunderstandings when reading identification documents abroad. The German positioning is a special case: Foreign border authorities would often confuse the abbreviation “Dr.” with the person’s first name, says the Federal Ministry of the Interior. The ministry promises faster controls in the future because the confusion will be cleared up.
The doctoral title does not disappear from the ID card: if desired, it moves to a specially created data field on the back of the ID card and on page 1 of the passport. The standard for travel documents of the United Nations International Aviation Organization (ICAO) only provides for the family name for the “name” data field and no other additions.
The identical procedure for ID cards and passports is justified by a recent motion for a resolution by the coalition factions to make passports and ID cards compliant.
But doctoral graduates can't breathe a sigh of relief yet: complete deletion is still up for debate. There have already been several attempts to implement the plan, including in the wake of the Guttenberg affair in 2011. The Federal Administrative Court and the Federal Court of Justice have clarified that the doctor is not part of the name and therefore no one has a right to be addressed with it the Petitions Committee of the Bundestag. As the Saarbrücker Zeitung describes, the petition to remove the doctorate was passed on to the parliamentary groups.
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