Eurocrats vs Burocrats

By Brussels correspondent

Today the European Commission is proposing to abolish the bureaucratic rubber-stamping required to get public documents as birth certificates. Citizens moving to another member state have to spend a lot of time and money in order to demonstrate that their public documents issued by the other member-state are authentic.
The ‘Apostille’ certificate which is used by public authorities in other states as proof that public documents, or the signatures of national officials on documents, to proof the authenticity of the piece.
Businesses operating across EU borders are affected required to produce certified documents to prove their legal status. These requirements date from an era. Today as EU member-states trust each other’s court judgments, we should be able to trust the other member-states official instances.

The European Commission is proposing to scrap the ‘Apostille’ stamp and a further series of arcane administrative requirements for certifying public documents for people living and working in other Member States.
“Every time you cross a border, you don’t have to get your foreign office to confirm that your passport really is a passport – why should you have to do so for a birth certificate?” said Vice-President Viviane Reding, the EU’s Justice Commissioner. “When you move abroad, having to go through these costly formalities in order to establish that your birth certificate is indeed a birth certificate or simply to make use of a company certificate creates a bureaucratic headache. I have heard countless stories about the hassle involved in satisfying these incomprehensible requirements. Today, the Commission is acting to simplify people’s and companies’ lives when they exercise their free movement rights in the EU.”

Under the Commission’s proposals, adopted today, citizens and businesses would no longer have to provide costly ‘legalised’ versions or ‘certified’ translations of official documents when, for example, registering a house or company, getting married, or requesting a residence card. Twelve categories of public documents1 would automatically be exempted from formalities such as ‘Apostille’ and ‘legalisation’ – which are currently required for around 1.4 million documents within the EU each year. Abolishing these requirements will save citizens and businesses in the EU up to 330 million euro, not counting the saved time and inconvenience that is avoided.

The new rules will not, however, have any impact on the recognition of the content or the effects of the documents concerned. The new rules will only help prove the authenticity of the public document, for example whether a signature is authentic and the capacity in which the public office holder is signing. This will have to be mutually accepted between Member States without any additional certification requirements.

The Commission is also proposing a further simplification tool: optional multilingual standardised forms in all EU official languages that citizens and businesses could request instead of and under the same conditions as national public documents concerning birth, death, marriage, registered partnership and legal status and representation of a company or other undertaking (see Annex for examples). This would particularly help to save on translation costs, since the attraction of such an option is that it frees citizens and businesses from having to worry about translations. The design of these forms has taken inspiration from specific international conventions2.
The proposal also provides for safeguards against fraud. If a national authority has reasonable doubt about a particular document, Member States will be able to check its authenticity with the issuing authorities through the existing Internal Market Information System (IMI).

Anna van Densky

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