The Apostille – The Hague Convention of 5 October 1961

    Starting with March 16th, 2001, Romania joined the Hague Convention of 5 October 1961, a Convention concerning the abolishing of the requirement of legalization for foreign public documents. Before joining this convention, in order to recognize the Romanian documents, one had to follow a complicated procedure, the authentication of documents being performed only through the consulates of the countries for which the recognition was needed, with a previous approval from the part of Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Justice from Bucharest. The Apostille has simplified extensively this procedure and consists of an application of a stamp (the Hague Apostille) on documents in order to authenticate / legalize them internationally.
    Until November 1st, 2004, In Romania there were only 2 authorities that had the right to apply the apostille: the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Justice. In Romania, the term of apostillation was adopted for the documents sealed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the term of legalization was adopted for the Apostille applied by the Ministry of Justice.
    Starting with November 1st, 2004, the procedure of apostillation / legalization of Romanian documents became the competence of Prefectures and Appeal Courts, which are the only Romanian authorities that, at present, have the right to apply the apostille.
Caution: Starting with September 1st, 2005, the apostillation of documents is performed by courthouses instead of the Appeal Courts (in accordance with the Law no. 121 / 2005 of 05/05/2005 that provides within art. 2: “The Romanian authorities competent to apply the apostille provided at art. 3 paragraph (1) of the Convention are: courthouses, for official documents provided at art. 1 letters a), c) and d) and the prefectures, for official documents provided at art. 1letter b).”)

The apostille is in fact a square shaped stamp (with 9 cm long sides, identical in all member states of the Hague Convention and which is applied directly on the document to be authenticated or on an extension of it.

The Hague Apostille (irrelevant of the country in which it is applied, all these stamps bear the following designation: Apostille – Convention de la Haye du 5 Octobre 1961).

In order to get international recognition, the civil state documents, respectively the birth and marriage certificates, after having received the apostille from the Institution of the Prefect, are translated into the language of the target country by a licensed translator, including the apostille, after which they are authenticated by a notary public and, finally, the authenticated translation is legalized through an apostille applied by the competent Courthouse.