Palau has one of the newest apostille relationships with Türkiye: the route between the two opened on 23 June 2020. This page is for Palauan offices receiving Turkish papers and for Turks with Palauan documents. It covers the 2019 accession, what the 2020 date means in a Palau file, the division of the certifying power between the executive and the judiciary, the missing information and the place of translation.
Palau’s 2019 accession among the recent ones
Palau deposited its accession on 17 October 2019, and the HCCH table shows 23 June 2020. In the HCCH table, the accessions that followed include Jamaica, Singapore and Indonesia. Nobody objected to Palau’s accession, Türkiye included; the point is worth noting because several accessions of the following years, Pakistan’s and Bangladesh’s among them, drew objections. Palau has objected to no other accession and is not named in the Kosovo note.
23 June 2020: where a Palau file begins
The Convention began to operate between Türkiye and Palau on 23 June 2020; before that date there was no apostille route between them. A Palauan certificate issued after it is read before a Turkish institution within the Convention, and a Turkish certificate stands on the same footing before a Palauan authority. How a file prepared by some other route before 2020 is treated today was not found in this site’s survey; the receiving institution answers that.
The Minister of State and the Supreme Court’s Clerk of Courts
The HCCH authority page, updated on 18 February 2020, four months after the accession, gives the power to two authorities: the Minister of State, and the Clerk of Courts of the Palau Supreme Court. One sits in the executive, the other in the judiciary. The HCCH summary does not say which document goes through which channel, and that could not be verified here. The page has not been updated since 2020, so whether the two authorities are still the same cannot be read from it.
Fee, register and side conventions in a Palau file
No fee appears on the HCCH authority page, and none could be verified. The e-APP chart of 13 August 2026 has no Palau row and the authority page shows no online register. Palau is not on the list of Members of the Hague Conference; that does not change the Convention relationship running since 2020. Palau has not acceded to ETS 063, CIEC 16 or CIEC 17. A document issued by a Palauan mission would fall outside the apostille under article 1 and follow the authentication route described by the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs; the detail of that procedure is on the page of the Ministry’s Legalisation Unit. The Turkish visa page lists the country as “Palau Cumhuriyeti”.
Turkish documents going to Palau, Palauan documents coming into Turkish
A Turkish document for Palau is certified in Türkiye: a valilik or kaymakamlık, the provincial or district governor’s office, for administrative documents such as a diploma or civil registry extract; a governor or district governor in any province or district for notarial acts; and the adli yargı adalet komisyonu başkanlığı for the original of a court judgment. A civil registry extract is among the six e-Apostil document types. Which language and certification Palauan institutions want on a translation of a Turkish document was not found in this site’s survey. On a Palauan document the certificate sits on the original; the Turkish translation is made in Türkiye and certified by a notary, and whether the certificate falls within the translation is asked of the receiving Turkish institution. A translation office renders the text and does not assess a file reaching back before 2020.