Schmidt & Schmidt offers the legalization of documents from Morocco by apostille.
Morocco has joined the Hague Convention Abolishing the Requirement of Legalization for Foreign Public Documents in the year 2016. Therefore no diplomatic authentication or legalization of documents from Morocco 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:
- Royal Prosecutor's Office for judicial and notarial douments
- Ministry of Justice for ministerial documents
- Government for all other documents
Some of the services associated with apostille in Morocco are available to order online. Also online, you can verify the authenticity of the apostille.
Documents issued by the Moroccan authorities and other authorized local structures, or certified by Moroccan notaries, published in Arabic, French, or Tamazight can be apostilled.
During legalization authorized officials verify the origin and authenticity of the document. After passing through this procedure, a special stamp (an apostille) is affixed to the document (or to its certified copy). As a rule, the apostille is placed on the back of the document, or on a separate sheet, after which the document is stitched.
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 apostille:
- Certificates of civil status (certificates of birth, death, marriage and divorce)
- Education documents (school reports, certificates, diplomas)
- Trade register excerpts
- 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 issued exclusively on an original document. Therefor, the latter must be in an apparent good condition, all stamps and signatures have to be clear and readable. Furthermore, it must not contain alien marking and labels.
Additional services
In addition to the legalization of your documents, we can provide you with high quality translations.
If you want to bring company information before the court, it needs to be legalised as well. We are therefore offering extracts from the commercial register of Morocco including apostille and translation.
Usually, processing the documents takes us 14 days.