If you are one of the millions of Pakistanis living or working abroad, you may have experienced the nightmare of trying to get a document attested for use in your country of residence. This attestation process, as many of you will agree, is one of the most excruciating, costly and ill-managed affairs you have ever been forced to partake in.

The documents, required to be attested, may range from proof of identity to academic certificates that would be needed for a variety of reasons such as job or immigration applications.

In my case, as a Pakistani national settled in the Middle East, I had the misfortune of having to get my marriage documents attested in order to apply for a dependent visa for my then newly-wed wife. Here’s what I learned.

The first step here was to obtain the Marriage Registration Certificate (MRC) issued by the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra). Mind you, this is slightly different from the nikkah nama which is a pre-requisite to obtain the Nadra MRC. Obtaining the Nadra certificate requires a visit to the local Union Council office, which registers the nikkah nama which must then be submitted to the Nadra for it to issue the MRC document, certifying the marriage. This process normally takes several weeks.

Once the Nadra MRC is issued, it must be taken to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) in Islamabad or to one of the ministry's camp offices located in major cities across Pakistan. Again, the document must be taken in person by either of the spouses. This stage has its own fee and application forms to be filled. There is ordinarily a long wait, although the document will be attested by MoFA within a couple of days.

After the ministry has attested the MRC, it must then be taken to the relevant embassy, again by one of the spouses. This again involves substantial fee and documentation.

Once the embassy attests the certificate, it can be transferred outside Pakistan where additional legalisation and costs are undertaken. Finally, the document can be used outside Pakistan for the relevant purpose.

If you think these steps are only for marriage-related documents, you are very much mistaken. In fact, almost all documentation, be it birth certificates, educational or professional documents, or other documents tied to more aspects of civil registration, must go through a maze of bureaucratic red tape before they can be submitted for use abroad. Moreover, this process had to be repeated for each document every time I moved to another country.

Why the need for attestation?

For many years, legalisation, authentication — or in Pakistan, colloquially referred to as attestation — has been the traditional method of verifying and certifying public documents internationally. In many countries, attestation of local official documents was not deemed necessary on the basis of the legal maxim, acta probant sese ipsa [documents prove themselves]. This meant that formal documents were presumed authentic unless proven otherwise.

As migration levels increased, nation states realised that the application of the above legal maxim to foreign documents placed an unreasonable burden on the party judging the authenticity or relying on these foreign documents.

It was considered unreasonable that people who were presented foreign documents would judge on sight the authenticity of those foreign documents. Therefore, to provide a legal safeguard, a slow and costly process comprising a sequence of authentications involving domestic departments and diplomatic and consular missions was introduced.

This developed the legalisation or authentication of foreign documents as we currently see them in application in Pakistan, among many other countries.

The Apostille Convention

Over time, however, documents requiring attestation started piling up in consular missions and governments again felt that the process was proving to be a source of great inconvenience to globalisation and resulted in frequent complaints.

Subsequently, the Council of Europe presented a request to the Hague Conference on Private International Law to consider this problem and to draw up a draft convention. The response was the 1961 Hague Convention Abolishing the Requirements of Legalisation of Foreign Public Documents — the “Apostille Convention”.

The Apostille Convention relaxes the authentication and legalisation requirements between contracting states. It essentially allows a document, duly authenticated domestically (usually taking the shape of notarisation) and apostilled in one contracting state to be used in another contracting state without the need for legalisation of the document — avoiding the process of taking documents to diplomatic and consular missions.

In the region, most notably India, Oman and Bahrain have contracted and ratified the Apostille Convention. There are currently 121countries, up from 108 a few years ago, that are part of the Apostille Convention. Most notably, these are the US, European Union countries, Japan and Australia.

Where does Pakistan stand

Currently, Pakistan is not a member state to the Apostille Convention. This means that attestation of documents originating in Pakistan or destined for use in Pakistan involve multi-layered bureaucratic procedures, increased costs and, most importantly, delays.

In order to use foreign public documents, even where documents originate from a member state to the Apostille Convention, in Pakistan or Pakistani public documents in another country, the documents require a multi-step attestation process.

This involves taking the document to 1) the notary or other relevant attesting authority, then 2) the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Pakistan or of the country under whose jurisdiction the issuing authority operates, 3) and after this, the consulate or the relevant diplomatic mission of Pakistan in the country where the earlier steps had taken place or the consulate or diplomatic mission of the relevant country in Pakistan.

A headache for overseas Pakistanis

According to the International Labour Organisation, Pakistan is one of the largest labour-exporting countries in the region. As of December 2019, more than 11 million Pakistanis have proceeded abroad for employment to over 50 countries through official procedures. This figure is expected to rise, with the United Nations noting that global migration trends have superseded population growth figures (the number of international immigrants reached an estimated 272 million in 2019 compared to 221m in 2010).

While most of the migration of Pakistani workers is focused towards the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, a substantial number also migrates to Europe, North America and Australia.

As a result, a large number of Pakistanis are affected as they are forced to follow a complex, time-consuming process while moving to work abroad or emigrating or to attend to their usual affairs involving Pakistan. In addition, increased security concerns over the past few years have led to diplomatic and consular missions providing attestation services through third party service providers or agents, adding an additional layer of cost and time to the overall process. This can also render Pakistanis vulnerable to unscrupulous service providers.

Overseas Pakistanis are often forced to choose between travelling to Pakistan at much cost or following a lengthy and costly process of ensuring that their documents are authenticated for use in the relevant jurisdiction.

In some cases, it is not possible to use third party services providers and powers of attorney have to be granted, which again requires that the POA document undergo a similar process.

In addition to people, the legalisation process also impacts trade. Pakistan’s top five export markets include the US, UK and Germany. All three are members to the Apostille Convention. On the other hand, China is not a party to the convention, but the treaty applies to documents originating in or destined to its territories of Hong Kong and Macau.

If Pakistan accedes to the Apostille Convention, a public document duly apostilled by a member state may be used in Pakistan and vice versa without the need for following a lengthy legalisation process involving various departments, consular offices and diplomatic missions.

This would definitely ease the procedures, time and costs involved in using documents of Pakistani origin in other foreign contracting states and vice versa and reduce bureaucratic red-tape. With Prime Minister Imran Khan urging officials in Pakistani missions overseas to improve service delivery, it is about time that the attestation process is streamlined to benefit the millions of people who are given the run-around for simple paperwork every day.

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