An exporter takes the document the buyer asked for to the kaymakamlık (district governor’s office); the clerk says that ordinary legalisation applies instead of an apostille, or sends the file on to the valilik (provincial governor’s office). Or the customs office or bank in the buyer’s country may look for legalisation on the apostilled document. Both reactions follow from one rule: some documents lie outside the Apostille Convention, and they receive a different certification instead of an apostille. The certificate of origin has its own page on this site; this page covers the moment of refusal and how the distinction is drawn.
A refusal that can come from either end
In Türkiye the sign is that the clerk looks at the document type and changes the procedure to ordinary legalisation; the service standard of the Çankaya District Governor’s Office keeps the two procedures on one line, “Apostille / Normal Tasdik”, with an apostille for administrative documents going to contracting states and ordinary legalisation for other countries, both in ten minutes. Abroad the sign is reversed: the buyer’s country may look for legalisation, not an apostille, on a shipping document that did receive one. The French Foreign Ministry’s legalisation table turns this into a written rule in footnote 9 of its row for Türkiye: documents drawn up by an administration and directly related to a commercial or customs operation require legalisation, not an apostille. The electronic route has the same boundary: the official e-Apostil system states in its FAQ that some international shipping documents and invoices are not given an e-Apostil.
Article 1 and the word “directly”
The last paragraph of article 1 of the Convention excludes two groups of documents from its scope; the second is administrative documents dealing directly with commercial or customs operations. The key word is “directly”. The test is not the subject of the document or the fact that its holder is a company, but whether the document is tied to a specific commercial or customs operation. The Onikişubat District Governor’s Office draws the line this way: that a document belongs to a company or has commercial content does not by itself mean an apostille cannot be issued; what is excluded is the administrative document directly related to a commercial or customs operation. A certificate of origin or a bill of lading for a shipment is tied to the operation itself; a company’s articles of association, signature circular or certificate of activity concerns the company and can be apostilled.
Ordinary legalisation instead of the apostille
For a document outside the scope, the procedure applied in Türkiye is what the provincial and district governor’s offices call ordinary legalisation (normal tasdik); the Zile District Governor’s Office writes that export documents obtained from professional chambers are legalised at the provincial governor’s office. What follows that stamp is decided by the buyer’s country. For a country outside the Convention, the sequence published by the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs applies: translation, notarial certification, legalisation at the provincial or district governor’s office and at the Ministry’s Legalisation Unit, followed by the destination country’s mission. For an excluded document going to a contracting state, whether the buyer country’s mission asks for a further stamp differs from country to country and is not information the Turkish authorities can give.
Splitting the export file into two piles
On a returned file, the documents are first sorted into two groups: documents tied to the operation and documents concerning the company. The first group takes the legalisation route, the second the apostille route; both routes can sit side by side in the same file. The buyer is asked to state in writing which document it wants with which certification; a double request such as “apostille or legalization” is reduced to one option under the buyer country’s rule. For the registry certificate the Trade Registry Regulation fixes the form (article 16: signature of the registry director or deputy and the registry seal), and the Antalya chamber’s registry pages add that it can also be obtained through MERSİS as a document with a secure electronic signature, which falls under the rule for e-signed printouts. No special apostille chain for documents of the trade registry office was found on an official page; that these documents count as administrative documents and are apostilled at the provincial or district governor’s office is an inference from district office examples, not a rule.
Translation for a customs document
On an excluded document the translation may come before or after the ordinary legalisation; the buyer’s country decides. In the chain for a country outside the Convention the translation is the first step and the notarial certification is placed on the translation. That notarial certification is itself a notarial act; if the document is going to a contracting state, the apostille on it is issued by the governor or district governor, so the ordinary legalisation of the original and the apostille on the translation can sit in the same file. In shipping documents the product names, tariff headings and quantities are carried into the translation exactly.