The authorities of the People's Republic of Bangladesh officially deposited their instruments of accession to the Convention of 5 October 1961 for the Abolition of the Requirement of Legalization for Foreign Public Documents, also known as the Apostille Convention, with the Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH) on July 29, 2024. The official website of the Hague Conference reports this.
There are now 127 states participating in the Apostille Convention. The document will come into force for Bangladesh on March 30, 2025. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been appointed as the body authorized to certify documents with an apostille.
The solemn ceremony of depositing the documents took place at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, which is the depositary of the Convention. It was attended by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Bangladesh Dr. Hassan Mahmud, the Ambassador of Bangladesh to the Netherlands Riaz Hamidullah and other representatives of the foreign ministry of the People's Republic. The documents were received by the head of the treaty department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, Jules van Eindhoven.
As Schmidt & Schmidt previously reported, today Bangladeshi citizens, in order to use their documents abroad, are forced to undergo a lengthy and expensive consular legalization procedure, which is complicated by the fact that many states do not station their diplomatic missions in the country. You can find more information on consular legalization of documents in Bangladesh here.
Apostille is an international standardized form of filling out information about the legality of a document for presentation on the territory of states and countries that recognize this form of legalization. The Apostille stamp is placed on originals and copies of documents. An apostille does not require any other certification or legalization of a document and is recognized by the official bodies of all states parties to the Convention. An apostille may not be used if there are legal grounds that cancel or simplify the legalization of a document. In 2021-2024, the process of states joining the Hague Convention has sharply intensified. Its members include, among others, such large countries as China, Canada, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
