An UNMIK Travel Document was a passport-sized document used to foreign travel for residents of Kosovo

Kosovo

Kosovo is a region in southeastern Europe. Part of the Ottoman Empire for more than five centuries, later the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija within Serbia...

, who were not able to obtain a passport

Passport

A passport is a document, issued by a national government, which certifies, for the purpose of international travel, the identity and nationality of its holder. The elements of identity are name, date of birth, sex, and place of birth....

 from Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia refers to three political entities that existed successively on the western part of the Balkans during most of the 20th century....

. The document was issued by the UNMIK

United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo

The United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo or UNMIK is the interim civilian administration in Kosovo, under the authority of the United Nations. The mission was established on 10 June 1999 by Security Council Resolution 1244...

 from 2000 till 2008. After the government of Kosovo started to issue their own passports

Kosovan passport

The Kosovan passport is a travel document that is issued to the citizens of the disputed Republic of Kosovo. The document facilitates international travel as well as serving as proof of citizenship. The issuance of passports is the prerogative of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, with the...

, the UNMIK ceased issuing them. Existing documents retained their validity until expiry (the last ones expired in 2010).

The travel document was not a passport as it did not contain information on Nationality

Nationality

Nationality is membership of a nation or sovereign state, usually determined by their citizenship, but sometimes by ethnicity or place of residence, or based on their sense of national identity....

 and as it was not issued by a sovereign state. The document carried UNMIK travel document/titre de voyage on the cover, contained 32 pages and was valid for 2 years. The document contained a machine readable

Machine-readable passport

A Machine Readable Passport is a travel document where the data on the identity page is encoded in optical character recognition format. Many countries began to issue machine readable travel documents in the 1980s....

 strip. As the issuing authority was the UNMIK, the document had the official three-letter code "UNK" where normally the country code is placed. The document was the only other travel document issued by the United Nations

United Nations

The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...

 besides the United Nations Laissez-Passer

United Nations Laissez-Passer

A United Nations Laissez-Passer is a travel document issued by the United Nations under the provisions of Article VII of the 1946 Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations in its offices in New York and Geneva, as well as by the International Labor Organization...

, which is mainly issued to employees of the UN and its specialized agencies.

Limited acceptance

As the status of Kosovo was and remains controversial, the document was not widely accepted. For those countries that did accept it, its non-passport status sometimes restricted its applications. For example, although the US did accept the UNMIK Travel Document, it did not place visa stickers in the document itself, but on a detached sheet.