Schmidt & Schmidt offers the attestation of documents from Armenia by apostille.

Armenia has joined the Hague Convention Abolishing the Requirement of Legalization for Foreign Public Documents in the year 1994. Therefore no diplomatic authentication or consular legalization of documents from Armenia is required for the legal communication with another member state of the convention. The documents only need to be attested by an apostille certificate with an "apostille" stamp on it by the issuing state's authorities in order to be valid in the state of destination.

Responsible for issuing apostille certificates are the following institutions:

• Ministry of Foreign Affairs
• Ministry of Justice

An apostille is a stamp of rectangular shape. The heading "Apostille (Convention de La Haye du 5 octobre 1961)" must be in French.

The following documents can be authenticated by an apostille:

• 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 attached to an original document. Therefore, the latter must be 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. Armenia has been a party to the Minsk Convention since 1994. Other countries that are parties to the Convention are: Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Ukraine. For these states, an apostille certificate for documents issued in Armenia 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 Armenia 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.