New system for visa and labour card soon

New system for visa and labour card soon
By Ahmed Abdul Aziz (Our staff reporter) KHALEEJ TIMES 19 February 2008

ABU DHABI — The new link between the offices of the Ministry of Labour (MoL) and the Naturalisation and Residency Departments (NRDs) would be ready soon, said Ahmed Kajour, Executive Director of the IT and Technical Development Department at the ministry.

He told Khaleej Times on Sunday that the meeting with officials of the NRDs decided to create a new mechanism to issue and cancel the visa and the labour card on the spot at the offices of the MoL around the country.

“We are waiting for the endorsement of Lt. Gen. Shaikh Saif bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Minister of Interior, to implement the new link between the two wings of the government soon,” said Khajour.

The meeting focused on the benefits, such as online application for employment visas and issuing of visas and labour cards.

“We seek to make all those steps in just one move. The public relations officers (PROs) and the companies’ owners can complete the formalities for getting work permits, employment visas and labour cards in just one move to save effort and time,” said Kajour.

In the case of workers who joined other firms after the expiry of their visas, their employers violated the residency law not the labour law, he said.

“We coordinate the efforts with the NRDs to avoid such illegal practices by cancelling the visas with the labour cards at the same time from the same premises.

Meanwhile, sources at the Abu Dhabi Naturalisation and Residency Department (ADNRD), who declined to be named, said the cooperation with the MoL came as part of a plan to facilitate completion of formalities by the applicants and also to weed out the illegal workers from the country after the last amnesty in 2007 succeeded in deporting or legalising the status of more than 300,000 illegals.

The official statistics of the MoL and the NRD showed that more than 3,000 illegals had been caught across the country in the last three months.