The consulate of a foreign state in Türkiye draws up a single-status certificate, a birth record or a power of attorney for its citizen, and the document is taken to a Turkish institution. The Turkish institution may look for a legalisation on it. The holder tries an apostille, and the kaymakamlık, the district governor’s office, turns that away too. This page explains why legalisation is asked for on a consular document, for which states’ missions no legalisation is needed at all, and where it is obtained when it is needed. Why no apostille is placed on a consular document is explained on a separate page of this site; here the legalisation question and the difference between two lists are covered.
A request for legalisation on a consular document
The marriage registrar, the civil registry directorate or a Turkish notary may look on the foreign consulate’s document for a record showing that the mission’s signature is recognised by Turkish authorities. The difficulty is that this request is correct for some consular documents and unnecessary for others. Where it is unnecessary, the holder may be sent to the Ministry for a step the document does not need.
Two lists, one of them incomplete
Consular documents are excluded from the Apostille Convention by the last paragraph of its article 1; a separate instrument removes legalisation for them, the European Convention of 1968 on the abolition of legalisation of documents executed by diplomatic agents or consular officers. Türkiye ratified it in 1987, and the Council of Europe table shows 28 ratifications. The confusion comes from the lists not matching: the 2022 guide of the Derince municipality names the states that have joined the 1968 convention, but Cyprus, Latvia, San Marino and Ukraine are absent from it and present in the Council of Europe table. A clerk working from the incomplete list asks for legalisation on a document from a state that has acceded; a holder reading the same list builds an unnecessary legalisation chain. On this site the authoritative list is the Council of Europe table.
Mission of a state that has acceded: no stamp, translation still
If the mission belongs to a state that has acceded to the 1968 convention, the document needs no legalisation before a Turkish authority. The Derince guide writes this expressly for the marriage file: certificates of capacity to marry and birth certificates drawn up by the consulates of those states are processed without legalisation by any authority if they bear the issuing authority’s signature and seal, together with a notarised Turkish translation if they are in a foreign language. The exemption removes the certification chain; it does not remove the requirement that the document be in Turkish. If the clerk still asks for legalisation, what the holder can show is the row in the Council of Europe table and the Turkish Foreign Ministry’s information sheet; this site’s survey found no source showing that every Turkish institution applies the exemption in the same way.
Mission of a state that has not acceded: Ankara or the province
If the mission belongs to a state that has not acceded to the 1968 convention, the route published by the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs is followed: the certification is legalised at the Ministry’s Legalisation Unit if the mission is in Ankara, and at the provincial governor’s office if the mission is in another city. The description of duties of the Legal Affairs Branch of the Ankara Governor’s Office lists the legalisation of documents drawn up or certified by foreign missions in the province as a separate task; which unit does the same work at other provincial governor’s offices was not verified province by province in this site’s survey. The detailed procedure is on the Legalisation Unit’s own page. This procedure is not an apostille; it is a confirmation that the mission’s signature is recognised.
What to show the clerk, what to ask
On a returned file, the first step is to look up the state of the issuing mission in the Council of Europe table. If the state is in the table, the clerk is shown the table and the Foreign Ministry’s sheet; if the institution still insists on legalisation, it is asked to put that in writing. If the state is not in the table, the legalisation chain is built: the mission first, then the Ministry or the governor’s office. In both cases, if the document is in a foreign language, a notarised Turkish translation is added. How each institution wants the document differs; a civil registry directorate and a notary may treat the same consular document differently, and those differences were not measured on this site.
Translation of a consular document and what was not measured
Translation in this chain is independent of legalisation and indispensable. On an exempt document the translation is the only link: a yeminli tercüman, a sworn translator whose oath is on record at a Turkish notary, translates the consular document into Turkish, the notary certifies it, and the document is presented in that form. On a legalised document the translation is made after the legalisation; whether it takes in the legalisation entries is for the Turkish institution to say. A Turkish institution needs no apostille on the translation. Three things this site did not measure are stated plainly: whether every Turkish institution applies the exemption uniformly, which unit handles legalisation at provincial governor’s offices outside Ankara, and the missions’ own legalisation procedures and charges for states that have not acceded.