Which Passports Are The World’s Most Powerful?
Here in Australia we’re pretty lucky to be #blessed with such a free passport – you’d be hard-pressed to find a country that straight-up barred you for trying to enter (well, other than North Korea). But what is surprising is that we don’t even fall into the top ten of the world’s most powerful and mobile passports.
The 2015 Passport Index has been released – ranking passports of all countries across the world based on how many nations citizens can visit visa-free. We’re ranked number nine in terms of how many countries we’re allowed access to – which is 138, but the people of 25 other countries can roam around more places in the world than us. That’s all thanks to the European Union, mostly – if you’re an EU national, you can skip, hop and jump across the vast majority of the continent with no trouble at all.
Taking out the top spot were the Uniteds – the Kingdom and the States (unsurprisingly), with access to 147 countries each. In second place comes EU members France and Germany, and South Korea, which is one of only two countries with completely free access to all nations in the G8 – well, G7 now that nobody’s really au fait with whatever Russia’s doing.
Still – ninth place for us isn’t half bad. Making up the bottom of the list is countries that are only allowed access to 28 places across the world: Sao Tome and Principe, the Palestinian Territories (let’s not get into that, but REALLY?), the Solomon Islands, Myanmar [Burma] and South Sudan.
