Ninmurai

Hi,

I'm getting endless grief from SEF about our paper trail to register for my non-EU partner's card. The British Embassy/Consulate in Lisbon are rubbish and not helping me out.

A couple of general questions if members of this forum who have non-EU family members with them:

• Did you have to translate affidavit/marriage/birth certificate into Portuguese? Or was English enough?
• If you had to produce more than the marriage certificate, such as proof of relationship, letters etc., did you translate these into Portuguese too, or was English enough?
• SEF are forcing me to produce a British birth certificate as I am identifying myself in Portugal as a British. However, this is impossible for me as I was born outside UK and naturalised as British later. Hence no British birth certificate. What did you do in this circumstance?

I'm really at my wit's end with SEF as it's been 4 appointment re-schedules, loads of arguments and visits to the ACM (High Commission of Migration) and SEF are just playing dumb to them. SEF's employees all give very inconsistent messages too so we really have no idea what to do anymore.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Sunseeker1st

I would suggest you hire a documents agency who are used to dealing with all the hassels of beaurocracy. Well worth the money.

Ukkram

It took my South African wife 5 months to get her Residencia Card.
Before we left SA my wife got our Unabridged Marriage Certificate from Home Office and her Police Clearance from the police station.

The MC we sent to the SA embassy in Lisbon and they had it Apostiled and translated for a fee. It is sealed with a ribbon with the loose ends attached by a wax stamp.

The EU Immigration rules state that documents in English and French need not be translated. Our SEF did not know that.

SEF also wanted proof that our marriage was registered in an EU country. This seemed to me to be an afterthought by a junior official as the boss had already said we were done. The rules do not require this.

The embassy does not do this so I had to get our marriage registered in Finland with the Apostiled MC. This they sent me and the embassy had it translated in Lisbon.
Done for wife.

Mine was simple.

Ninmurai

Wow - officially it should take a maximum of 3 months! Did you make enquiries along the way?

Could you point to the exact law or rule you are referring to? I did not know this.

This is my biggest problem with SEF. Each employee seems to be making up their own rules and none of it is actually written on their website on their required documents list.

Ukkram

SEF can extend your wife's visa by 3 months at a time and we were told that they have a deadline of 6 months but if the problem lies on your side, they will extend it longer. We had a 6 month postal strike in SA at the time.

I cannot find the site that states the document language required but I had it printed out to show them. The Lisbon embassies will have Portuguese staff that will add a "Declaraçao" written in Portuguese to any document explaining the content. I does not need to be done by a registered translator as long as it has the embassies stamp and signature.

Make sure you get your registration from the town council before you apply for your wife's residencia as SEF will ask for it.

https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizen...d/index_en.htm

Naaling

I think you will find that the number documents required depends on the attitude and behaviour of the applicant!

captainflack

My wife is Brazilian and we got married in Brazil, consequently we didn't need a translation of the cert (already in Portuguese) but I recall it did need to be legalized, and get a stamp from the PT embassy in brazil.

Also, because we'd been married 4 years, they made us get the cert reissued. It has to be issued within the last 6 months I believe. They said this is because we might not still be married. While I can see some logic in that, I did point out that we never lived in Brazil, we'd come to Portugal direct from Dubai, so even if we'd got divorced, Brazil would probably have no record of that anyway. Aside from the fact we have two kids with us and were living in Portugal together, which would be rather curious to do after we were divorced. But that was the rules, so we did it.

My understanding is that you should only need to produce the marriage cert (recent, legalized). Unless there are specific concerns your marriage is not genuine (and the onus is on them to produce those and justify them), they should not need be able to require further proof. I recall there was even EU caselaw about a couple living separately while married, which established that if they're legally married, they comply with the residency requirements.

Birth cert, I am not sure as I was born in UK. But I would imagine that in such cases, they should accept your birth cert and then documents proving your naturalization.


We did our residency process in Cascais, where we lived for first year. Not sure where you're doing it, but my impression was that it was very easy for us and also at SEF for my wife (they made us get the new wedding cert, but kept the application open and told her just to drop it in 2-3 weeks later once she had it). She had her residency docs within about a month of applying. Cascais has a lot of EU citizens, generally professional jobs, so it seemed to me (with hindsight) that it was a good place to do this as they knew the process very well at the camara, and SEF there tended not to scrutinize applications too cynically. I am self employed software development, but nobody really asked any questions about that or made me prove it. I'd like to think the system is uniform and applications are treated similarly everywhere, but I suspect that's probably not the case.

liveaboard

European marriage certificates are all in a common formate, in [as I recall] 4 languages. So an EU certificate will be acceptable, a non-EU one likely not, regardless of language.
It's all diabolically complicated, not just in Portugal.
Try emigrating to the US, or UK...

Ukkram

SEF most certainly did not ask my wife for a birth certificate. They are outdated and a citizen card or I.D card/book showing your birth date is just as good.

Ninmurai

Yes quite possibly! But when you produce a birth certificate that they won't accept because it's too old, and your birthplace is 7000 miles away, and the country is not party to the Apostille system, and there is no Portuguese Embassy there, and PT won't accept it anyway because it's not the country of my nationality, it's not a hoop I'm willing to jump through. Criminal records and bank statements I can understand, but seriously, what might providing a newer birth certificate prove? That I am still alive?

The emphasis here is that because we are de-facto partners, we are not married under the Portuguese system and hence the requirement for birth certificate. Married couples do not need a birth certificate. We have signed Registered Partnership in The Netherlands, which is treated as equivalent to marriage there, but it is not recognised under the Portuguese systems - as confirmed by the Dutch embassy in Lisbon.

Naaling

Is the problem that the birth certificate is too old or the authentication is too old? If the authentication is too old, then can you have it re-authenticated by the appropriate embassy in Lisbon? (if there is one)
We had a similar situation with our marriage certificate from the Philippines. The authentication provided by the DFA in Manila was too old. We simply took it to the Philippine Embassy in Lisbon and had it re-authenticated and it was accepted without any problems.

liveaboard

Or you could get married here in Portugal.

Ninmurai

I think it may have been the authentication, though I cannot be too sure. I called up the Taiwan 'embassy' in Lisbon who would not re-legalise it because it had already been 'used' or 'received' before by The Netherlands, so we've already gotten a new ones.

Ninmurai

An update for you all.

We successfully submitted our documents, but this was not without problems. It involved a lot of back and forth discussions with the agent serving us, and between the agent and back-office supervisor.

Armed with about 200 letters in our names over the course of 4 years (official letters from Municipality, tax bills, dentist bills, hospital letters, utilities statements), I basically let them pick whatever they wanted.

Here is the list of documents that got accepted in the end:

• My passport
• My EU Residence Certificate issued by Portugal
• My Partner's passport
• Taiwanese Birth Certificate (mine and partner's). Translated to English. Both the Original and translations were notarised, legalised by Ministry of Foreign Affairs Taiwan, legalised by Taipei Representative Office in Lisbon (because there is no Portuguese Embassy in Taiwan) Not translated to Portuguese
• Partner's Affidavit of Single Status, written in English, notarised, legalised by MOFA Taiwan, legalised by Taipei Representative Office Lisbon. Not translated to Portuguese
• British Affidavit of Single Status, written in English, Notarised, Apostilled by Foreign and Commonwealth Office UK. Not translated to Portuguese
• Original and Translation (Dutch -> Portuguese) of Letter from Immigration and Naturalisation Department of The Netherlands (my previous residence) for granting of EU Residence Card for Family Member. Only the translation notarised in Portugal. Original not Apostilled.
• Multi-lingual town hall extracts from The Netherlands stating our residence there, dated between 2013-2016. Not Apostilled
• Original Certificate of Registered Partnership issued by The Netherlands. (Dutch). Not Apostilled
• Multi-lingual 'international copy' of the same Certificate of Registered Partnership issued by The Netherlands. (Includes English and Portuguese and several more languages) Not Apostilled
• Accommodation rental contract in Portugal
• Portuguese bank statement dated last week. Signed and stamped by the bank. (They did not accept my UK and Netherlands bank accounts)

All documents were digitised, including all the pages of my partner's passport which contained a stamp, and the originals returned to us on the spot. Photo, fingerprints and signature taken on their machine.

So to answer some of my own questions. Documents had to be submitted in Portuguese or English. Having complained sufficiently about my lack of UK birth certificate they accepted my Taiwanese one.

As we were not married, there was some subjective level of evidence required. They felt our letter from the Dutch Immigration department was important because it did not explicitly state that it was issued because she was my partner...only that she was the partner of an EU citizen. I suspect they took in the extracts from the town hall registry as further backup because of this issue.

We paid the €15 for the residence card plus €6 for home delivery, because I don't want to spend another moment there, and was issued with certificate of application of residence card.

Until the card is in our hands however, I won't be celebrating just yet. SEF said it should take around 15-20 days to arrive.

Ninmurai

Another update:

We received the Residence Card of an EU Family Member by post precisely 7 days after we submitted. That's an impressive turnaround considering it was right at the close of day when we finished our submission, and we received it in the morning so they had in effect done everything they needed in 4 or 5 days.

One issue is they put my partner's country of birth as China, despite her birth certificate being issued by Taiwan - confusingly with the official name "Republic of China". We have made another appointment in February to get this corrected. I did not mention in my previous post that the agent originally put "Chinese" down my partner's nationality until we corrected it. She (and every other Portuguese we have encountered) thought that Taiwan was a part of China. I suspect this current issue comes from the agent innocently forgetting to change the place of birth too.

It took quite a bit more explaining that Taiwan uses different country code TWN as opposed to CHN. Even pointing at the "nationality" section in her passport the SEF agent still would not believe it when we said China is called the "People's Republic of China". When they tried to argue my partner's passport says "Republic of China" and they were arguing that the final word states "China", I mentioned that my passport says "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" and you cannot only rely only the final word. I also pointed out 'Korea' as another example where the words matter. The Chinese use a red passport too, while Taiwan uses green.

So the story is nearly complete, but the final hurdle still needs to be cleared. I don't entirely blame SEF for getting the political situation mixed up because it keeps happening to us at airports too, but surely they should not totally distrust someone when they say what their nationality and birth place is?