UAE Consular Legalisation

by Richard Gregory Horton

Legalisation Department at LM NOTARY PUBLIC LTD

If you need to use your documents in the United Arab Emirates, it is likely you will require consular legalisation from the UAE embassy in London. This is because the UAE is one of the few countries not to have signed the Hague Apostille Convention, which allows documents with a notary’s stamp and an apostille from the Foreign Office to be used abroad. Once your documents have been notarised and apostilled, the next step is to pay the fees for legalisation. These will be considerably higher for commercial documents, running to £500 – £600 per document, than for personal identity and educational documents. Once we have received the embassy’s fees, our administration fees, and postage, we can process your documents along with the required cover notes, and they should arrive at the embassy by special delivery the next day. The consular legalisation department ask that we give them a week to process applications for legalisation at the best of times, and they usually keep to this timetable. When the process is completed, they will return the documents in a prepaid special delivery envelope we have included with the application, and they should arrive the next day at your UK address, or back at our office, whichever you have specified. The process is now complete, having taken about 10 days assuming no delays, and your documents are ready to be used in the Emirates!