After independence in 2006, Montenegro established its own travel-document system, with a new passport law taking effect in July 2008. A passport can carry the imprint of statehood, but the place where a citizen finally receives it is an ordinary Ministry of Interior counter.
Montenegro’s administrative-procedure portal, developed with technical assistance from UNCTAD, recorded the passport process step by step in 2018. For the stage titled “Collect a passport,” it listed a queue wait of five to twenty minutes. This was not the elapsed time for document production or an online backlog, but physical waiting for one’s turn at the collection counter.
Five or twenty minutes is not a spectacular line. Yet in the last few metres between a national document system and a citizen’s hand, there remained a small, ordered wait for verification and collection.