MANY Schengen countries require a Family Registration Certificate (FRC) along with other documents for processing visa applications, including Switzerland.

Recently, a friend and I decided to apply for Swiss tourist visas but lacked the required FRC. We chose to apply for the FRC online on the Nadra website, since we were told it was a straightforward and quick process. And so it is for most especially married people, but for single women Nadra’s database often yields a distorted/incomplete family tree. So, for us this process turned into a nightmare.

First, upon entering my information online, we were told our CNICs were not synced with our fathers’. We then visited a Nadra office in person who told us to apply for new CNICs. Why they were not synced in the first place was a question they did not have an answer to.

Being working women, we took time off work to visit the office after 3.00pm to avoid the morning crowd. I was shocked to find that all Nadra offices close to the public at 2.00pm — but this was neither mentioned anywhere on their website nor communicated by their staff, who would only furnish us with monosyllabic responses to our queries. Even my request to Nadra officials to sign a letter addressed to the Swiss embassy stating the reason for us not having FRCs fell on deaf ears. We were told it was simply out of the question.

It is my humble request to embassies in Islamabad to relax their FRC requirement for visa applicants in view of Nadra’s hodgepodge system. I will reserve my request to Nadra for myself because I doubt any good will come out of it.

Asfia Salahuddin
Karachi

Published in Dawn, April 4th, 2017