Consular Matters

If you or your partner do not yet have a residence permit for your destination country, you must contact the relevant consulate as soon as possible and obtain the necessary documents promptly.

A residence permit is often applied for upon arrival in the destination country. Make sure you have gathered all the necessary documents. For example, keep in mind that a certificate of good conduct from the countries where you have resided in recent years is usually required for the residence permit application. This certificate must generally be no more than three months old. In some countries, these certificates can only be applied for in person at the relevant office; you may also need to be registered as a resident, as is the case in Germany.

It is advisable, and usually required by the destination country, that passports must be valid for at least six months for visa applications.

Don't hesitate to ask questions—lots of them. At the consulate, at all relevant offices and authorities.

You are also welcome to contact us.

Think about schools, universities, and any documents your new landlord abroad might request. Be proactive and ask about everything multiple times. When you suddenly find yourself in your new home country, at a government office or at a new school, you don't want to be missing that one document everyone forgot to mention. And then, of course, the very document you need to get everything done. It's always surprising how inflexible South American bureaucrats can be... and how everything can fall apart because of a seemingly insignificant piece of paper.

Ensure that all documents are, if necessary, translated by a certified translator and apostilled, for all countries that have signed the Hague Apostille Convention. These countries require apostilled documents.

Legalization by Apostille

For countries that have signed the Hague Apostille Convention, legalization by Apostille is recognized. The document will be accepted in your new home country (destination country), and consular legalization in the country of origin is not required (Article 2 of the Hague Convention of 5 October 1961 Abolishing the Requirement of Legalisation for Foreign Public Documents).

For all countries that are not signatories, standard legalisation without an Apostille is sufficient, but subsequent consular authentication is required.

A list of signatory states can be found here.

You must inquire in your home country which authorities apostill documents.

Even for countries that are not signatories, where you need consular authentication, it is advisable to play it safe and always have your documents apostilled. Since most countries are signatories, this provides long-term protection; after all, you never know where your family might end up in the future.

Entire immigration processes involving large container shipments have failed due to documents that were neither apostilled nor consularly authenticated by the authorities. Although all their household belongings were at the destination port, the families were unable to arrange their stay.

If your documents are incomplete, you may have to fly back to your home country to rectify the situation. This would incur extra costs and derail your entire plan.

Some Asian and South American authorities frequently grant themselves discretionary powers not provided for by law and unlawfully demand documents that should never be requested under normal circumstances. In some cases, authorities interpret the laws to suit their own purposes.

Be meticulous, be persistent, obtain documents that might be relevant... It's better to have 25 documents too many than one missing.

You can also find tips in many expat forums about entry requirements, bureaucratic hurdles, and so on. You might even find posts related to your new home.

In our consultation, we also show you how to document some important intermediate steps of your preparations to expedite your customs clearance.

We look forward to hearing from you!