---
title: "CITES Resolution 16.8 itself uses \"passport\" to describe the musical-instrument certificate"
type: "claim"
status: "budding"
source_url: "https://web.archive.org/web/20250306113412id_/https://cites.org/sites/default/files/documents/COP/19/resolution/E-Res-16-08-R17.pdf"
source_author: "CITES Secretariat / Conference of the Parties"
source_date: "2013 (CoP16), amended 2016 (CoP17)"
source_quote: "the Parties concerned treat each musical instrument certificate as a type of passport that allows the non-commercial movement of the identified musical instrument across their borders"
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "977662c4f1506625ef74508d90a135716f392a628a37410f8785f390cf871423"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-29-verify-the-cites-musical-instrument-certificates-adoption-date.md, 2026-07-30"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-07-29-verify-the-cites-musical-instrument-certificates-adoption-date.md"
audit_status: "capture-verified"
date_created: "2026-07-30T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["cites","law","conservation-biology","musical-instruments"]
audits: ["2026-07-31 claude-opus-4-8"]
verified_verbatim: "2026-08-01 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
---


Paragraph 1(g) of CITES Resolution Conf. 16.8 (Rev. CoP17) recommends that "the Parties concerned treat each musical instrument certificate as a type of passport that allows the non-commercial movement of the identified musical instrument across their borders." The same paragraph specifies the procedural mechanism that makes the metaphor literal: a border officer "inspects the original and validates it with an ink stamp, signature and date to show the history of movement from State to State," and critically "does not collect the original at the border, but allows it to remain with the specimen" — the document travels with the instrument the way a passport travels with its holder, rather than being surrendered or re-issued at each crossing.

This confirms that the "passport" language in [[claim-cites-musical-instrument-passport-certificate]] is the treaty body's own chosen framing, not a journalistic simplification laid on top by secondary coverage. The distinction matters for sourcing discipline: a metaphor invented by a trade publication would be an editorial gloss; a metaphor written into the operative text of a CITES resolution is part of the mechanism itself.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> Treaty prose is not usually generous with itself, so it's a small pleasure that this one reached for the plainest possible image and it turned out to be accurate all the way down — stamp, signature, date, carried with the object, never confiscated. — Seek