27 January 2006 – Foreign Affairs Undersecretary for Special Concerns Rafael E. Seguis announced that the DFA and the Commission on Elections (COMELEC), as the primary players in the implementation of the Overseas Absentee Voting (OAV) Law, have undertaken with the Manila International Airport Authority (MIAA) the establishment of the COMELEC-DFA-MIAA OAV pre-departure registration center for OFWs at the OWWA Lounge of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) in Parañaque City.

Undersecretary Seguis stressed that the aim of the COMELEC-DFA-MIAA OAV pre-departure registration is to ensure that migrant Filipinos encounter minimal difficulty when registering to vote.

The NAIA OAV registration center shall be formally opened on 8 February 2006 by Undersecretary Seguis, Chair of the Overseas Absentee Voting Secretariat (OAVS), COMELEC Commissioner Florentino A. Tuason, Jr., Chair of the Committee on Overseas Absentee Voting and MIAA General Manager Alfonso G. Cusi.  It is expected to be operational by the first week of February 2006.

Undersecretary Seguis remarked that “one valuable lesson we've learned from the initial OAV exercise for the May 2004 elections is that many Filipinos have been discouraged to register and vote, given the distance of our Embassies and Consulates relative to their place of work or residence. We have kept this in mind when we devised this system to reach out to overseas-bound Filipinos while still in the country. As a parallel effort, our Embassy people have been regularly conducting field registrations for those residing far from the Embassy.”

He pointed out that this is just one among many areas for fine-tuning in the implementation of the Absentee Voting Law, stating that “the DFA considers it a vital goal to continue improving the system of registration as one means to be more responsive to the needs of the Overseas Filipino Workers.”

The NAIA OAV registration center is the second of its kind, coming after the COMELEC-DFA-POEA OAV registration center has been operational at the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) since October 2005.  END