An Article by Santiago Martín
According to what established in the 12th Hague Convention Abolishing the Requirement for Legalization for Foreign Public Documents of 5 October 1961 (the Apostille Convention) every signatory country recognizes the legal status of a public document issued by another signatory country, through the stamp of what is known as The Hague Apostille.
Therefore a single legalization procedure for the countries which are part of this Convention was established, which consists in placing on the public document itself or on an extension to the said document an apostille issued by a State, that is part of the convention and gives the referred document an equal legal status in any other signatory countries. As a consequence, countries that are signatories to the Apostille Convention recognize the authenticity of documents that have been issued in other countries and carry an apostille stamp and no further requirements are necessary. The documents issued in one Convention country that has been certified by an apostille must be recognized in any other Convention country without requiring any further other type of authentication.
The European Commission has recently proposed to reduce the bureaucratic proceedings, which have to be fulfilled by the European citizens and companies by eliminating the Haague Apostille and promoting the use of multilingual forms. The European Commission alleges that individuals who move to a different country of the European Union and companies, which develop any kind of commercial activity in a different country of the EU have to invest excessive time and money in order to fulfil all these formal requirements, which according to the European Commission have remained obsolete. Some countries of the EU already use this multilingual forms for issuing public documents, those forms are automatically recognized by the rest of European Countries without any further requirements. The European Commission states, that this would imply saving about 330 millions Euros.
