For a public Chilean document to acquire legal recognition abroad or, for such kind of document issued abroad to have the same recognition in Chile, it had to be legalized through a process that normally took a long time and it was rather tiresome, involving to go through several offices and stamps.
Since of august 30th of 2016, the Apostille entered into force in Chile. This procedure’s objective is to simplify the legalisation of all sorts of public documentation, be these of Chilean origin to be used abroad or vice versa. This procedure involves the certification, which is electronic and free of charge, of such documents, being now possible to recognize their legal validity without any further certification.
In order to make this effective Chile had to become a State party for the “Hague Convention Abolishing the Requirement of Legalisation for Foreign Public Documents” concluded on October the 5th of 1961 Hague, Netherlands, which was implemented in our national legislation throughout the publication* of Law Nº 20.711
Such Law involves a series of amendments to several Laws, as follows:
– Code of Civil Procedure
– Court’s Organic Code
– Law Nº 18.956
– Decree Nº 1 of 2006
– Law Nº 19.477
Thus, the competence to issue apostilles is given to some institutions depending of these authorities:
– Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
– Civil Registry Service.
– Ministry of Health.
– Ministry of Education.
– Ministry of Justice and Human Rights.
This being said, it is worth mentioning that the certification is only valid for State parties of the “Apostille Convention”
As it is was already stated, this procedure is electronic (E-Apostille) which means that said certification is carried throughout advanced electronic signature that can be verified online, nevertheless, it has to be requested in person before one of the institutions dependent of the authorities mentioned above.
In practice, to carry this procedure, the interested person has to appear before, regardless of the region of the country, any Regional Ministry Secretary, dependent of the Ministry of Education or Ministry of Justice, a Civil Registry’s Office, Healthcare Direction or Healthcare Intendancy, both of these dependent of the Health Ministry; and ask for the Apostille certification. If the document cannot be aspotilled by any of these institutions, the applicant, should ask for this procedure before any Foreign Affairs Ministry office.
If the applicant wishes to apply for the apostille of a document from a foreign country (not Chile) for a document issued in Chile, then he should go to the apostille website: aspostilla.gob.cl, upload the original document, with advanced electronic signature, contained within the PDF file, then proceed to select the type of document, and finally choose a consulate to withdraw the apostilled document. Then, the request will be analyzed by the corresponding office and finally,if the document meets the requirements, the apostille will be issued, and it will be sent to the selected consulate which will coordinate the withdrawal of the document.
Francisco Mulatti F. Abogado
Pic: Evan Batky