On 5 October 1961 the “Convention Abolishing the Requirement of Legalisation for Foreign Official Documents” was adopted, within the framework of the Hague Conference on Private International Law. Pursuant to this Convention, official documents do not have to be legalised (see the section Legalisation) in order to be legally valid in countries that are States parties to the Convention; instead, they have only to be “apostillised”. The Apostille-issuance procedure consists in attaching a special certificate, or affixing a stamp, to a document in its country of origin. Documents certified in this way are accepted, without any need for further certification, by the official agencies of all the other countries that are States parties to the Convention. Russia is a State party to the Convention. More than 70 countries of the world are currently States parties to the Hague Convention:

You’re opening an office in a foreign country and have to submit a set of your constituent documents to the registration authorities of that country? Or you want to open an account in a foreign bank and need to submit a set of your documents to that bank? If you want your documents to be legally valid in a foreign country — call us, and we’ll be happy to advise you how best to go about this and quote you a price for your order.