Japan Has the World’s Most Powerful Passport — But It’s Currently Meaningless

In April 2020, the Independent featured the launch of the Q2 2020 Henley Passport Index (HPI) at a time when global mobility has been rendered a hypothetical concept by COVID-19. As Dr. Kälin points out, “travel freedom is contingent on factors that occasionally can be utterly beyond our control”. Although Japan is once again at the top of the HPI, on the same day as the index was released, the country declared a state of emergency over coronavirus.