Document acceptance procedures to be simplified in EU countries

The EU Regulation on requirements for presenting certain public documents will enter into force on 16 February 2019. The purpose of the Regulation is to simplify the formal acceptance procedures of documents.

Regulation is applied to certain public documents issued by authorities in the EU Member States for example to establish the birth, death, name, marriage, residence or nationality of a person (see the whole list on the European Commission’s website).

Under the Regulation, an authority of another Member State should accept the document within the EU without the so-called apostille. In addition to this, multilingual standard forms that can be used as translation aids with certain documents will be introduced.

Under the Regulation, the central authorities of EU Member States will provide assistance when requests for information are made by the authorities. The central authority in Finland is the Population Register Centre, which together with the Ministry of Justice and the Finnish competition and Consumer Authority organises training for the authorities that work with these documents.

Local register offices advise citizens in practical questions related to the matter.

Additional information:

• contact details of local register offices
• the Ministry of Justice’s press release about the Regulation
• the entire Regulation on the European Commission’s website