No Translations and Apostille will be no longer needed for Criminal Record Certificates within the EU

The duty to present a Criminal Record Certificate is an inconvenience well-known to many EU citizens interacting with authorities of another member state.

It is true that most member states perform the necessary checks themselves when it comes to their own citizens, and the competent authorities can thus obtain information regarding the person’s criminal history on their own. However, in the case of foreign nationals, the authorities generally demand a Criminal Record Certificate issued in the state of the given person’s residence. Furthermore, the individual member states often stipulate that such a certificate must be presented along with a translation made by a certified translator and that it must be authenticated – generally in the form of an apostille (certification issued by a court of the given state, verifying the authenticity of the document it is attached to). Needless to say that all of this increases the costs and also the time needed.

In mid-February 2019 a new EU regulation comes into effect, based on which the member states may no longer ask for the authentication specified above, and it will thus be possible to present the certificate without any further verifications (as if the document was issued by authorities from the country where the document is to be presented).

Moreover, along with the Criminal Record Certificate, it will also be possible to ask for a multilingual standard form which will include the translation of a Criminal Record Certificate into the individual official languages of the EU. The duty to present a translated version made by a certified translator thus also ceases to exist. There will be no additional fee charged for issuing the form.

In the Czech Republic, the legislative works have already started to make sure that the multilingual certificates will be ready to be issued since the stipulated date.