13 government officials and Immigration chiefs from Australia, New Zealand, Samoa, Fiji, Cook Island and Solomon Island attended the two-day Management Board Meeting which was held at Penthouse in Koror.
Joseph M. Giramur, Director of the Bureau of Immigration represented Palau.PIDC is a forum for Official Immigration agencies of the Pacific Region. It has 23 members including Palau.The Management Board has five members representing countries from Micronesian and Polynesian.The objective of the annual meeting is to discuss issues related to people’s smuggling, human trafficking and illegal migration into pacific and to share information to strengthened border management across the region.Auseuga Poloma Komiti, PIDC chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Samoa government in an interview on Wednesday said they shared information on best practices, capacity building, forward documents like passports and birth certificates, permits, training and ability to detect or identify fraud documents.“It is important to share information so that we can all improve our border system. We are used as transit countries by some people who would use fraud documents. They would use different identities and use us as transit points to go to US, Australia or New Zealand,”Komiti said.“So we share information and intelligence to show that we’re able to meet the challenges and we have to keep up and increase our knowledge so we work in collaboration how to combat crimes,” the PIDC chairman added.Giramur in a separate interview said the PIDC annual meeting is funded by New Zealand and Australia.He said New Zealand also agreed to fund training for Palau’s law enforcement officers.Giramur said officers from Bureau of Custom, Immigration and Public Safety will attend two week training on gathering intelligence report in August.
