Schmidt & Schmidt offers the attestation of documents from Belarus by apostille.
Belarus has joined the Hague Convention Abolishing the Requirement of Legalization for Foreign Public Documents in 1992. Therefore no diplomatic authentication or legalization of documents from Belarus is required for the legal communication with another member state of the Convention. The documents only need to be stamped with an "apostille" by the issuing state's authorities in order to be valid in the state of destination.
Responsible for issuing the apostille are the following institutions:
- Ministry of Education for documents issued by education institutions
- Ministry of Justice for judicial documents
- Archive offices
- Ministry of Foreign Affairs
The process of legalizing documents with an apostille in Belarus foresees that the Competent Authority checks and certifies the authenticity of the signature on the underlying public document, the capacity in which the person signing the document has acted, and the identity of the seal or stamp which the document bears (if any). Afterwards a certificate with a stamp "apostille" is attached to the document. As a rule, the apostille is placed on the reverse side of the original document or on a separate sheet and gets affixed to it.
The apostille is a stamp in the shape of a square. It should be filled in in the official languages of the issuing authority. The heading "Apostille (Convention de la Haye du 5 octobre 1961)" written in French is a mandatory requirement for an apostille's validity.
For the following documents an apostille can be issued:
- Certificates of civil status (certificates of birth, death, marriage and divorce)
- Education documents (school reports, certificates, diplomas)
- Extracts from the commercial register
- Judicial decisions
- Notarially certified copies of documents
- Notarially certified translations
- Further notarial documents (authorizations, last will, declarations)
- Commercial documents legalized by a state organ of registration (articles of incorporation, registration certificates, tax registrations etc.)
Requirements for the documents:
An apostille can be exclusively issued for the original document. Therefore, the latter must be presented in a good condition, with all stamps and signatures clearly visible and readable. Furthermore, it must not contain alien markings or labels.
Exemption from apostille and consular legalization
According to Art. 13 of the Convention on Legal Assistance and Legal Relations in Civil, Family and Criminal Matters (also called the Minsk Convention), the documents of the participating countries do not require legalization. Belarus has been a party to the Minsk Convention since 1994. Other countries that are parties to the Convention are: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Ukraine. For these states, an apostille certificate for documents issued in Belarus is not required, instead a notarized translation will suffice.
Additional services
In addition to the legalization of your documents, we can provide you with high quality translations.
Should you require company information for the court, it needs be legalised as well. We are therefore offering extracts from the commercial register of Belarus including apostillation and translation.
Usually, processing the documents takes us 14 days.
Courier services are charged and invoiced separately according to the courier service’s rates.
You can pay for our services by PayPal, bank transfer or card.
