E-apostille in the UK and Turkey

Two systems, one convention

The Hague Conference's electronic apostille programme lets countries issue apostilles as digitally signed PDFs with an online register for verification. The UK and Türkiye have both adopted it, but for different sets of documents and with different rules, so it pays to check which one applies to yours before you order a translation.

The UK e-Apostille

The FCDO Legalisation Office's e-Apostille service costs £35 and is designed for documents that already carry a qualifying electronic signature, typically a PDF that a UK notary or solicitor has signed electronically, or an electronically signed document from a UK public body. GOV.UK lists documents for which the e-Apostille is not available: GRO certificates (birth, marriage, death), ACRO police certificates, DBS certificates and fingerprint certificates. For those you need the paper service at £45. Turnaround for the e-Apostille is published on GOV.UK as a small number of working days; the paper service depends on post in both directions.

The result is a PDF with the apostille attached and a reference that can be checked on the FCDO's online register. If the Turkish office receiving it can verify online, this saves the round trip of posting the original to the FCDO and then couriering it to Türkiye. See FCDO Legalisation Office.

The Turkish e-Apostil

Türkiye's e-Apostil system (eapostil.gov.tr, reached through e-Devlet) has grown in stages: criminal record certificates (adli sicil kaydı) and court decisions from 2019; the civil-registry extract (nüfus kayıt örneği) from June 2021; and multilingual birth, marriage and death extracts (Formül A/B/C) from 28 December 2023. You can obtain these from the UK with your e-Devlet login, download the apostilled PDF, and the apostille carries a verification code. There is no state fee. Because these are the documents most often used in UK visa, passport and marriage applications, a Turkish resident of the UK can now usually get an apostilled original without visiting Türkiye. See Turkish e-Apostil and using e-Devlet from the UK.

Comparison

Will the receiving body accept an electronic apostille?

Acceptance of an e-Apostille rests with the receiving office. UK public bodies rarely require an apostille on Turkish documents at all, so for UK purposes the Turkish e-Apostil is a convenience rather than a necessity. For Turkish purposes, offices that can verify a UK e-Apostille online generally accept it, but individual notaries, tapu offices and courts differ, and some still ask to see a paper certificate stapled to the original. Ask the specific office before choosing the electronic route, and choose paper if the answer is unclear.

How we translate an e-apostilled document

We translate the apostille certificate as part of the document, reproduce the verification code and address exactly, and note in the translation that the source was an electronically issued PDF. The certified translation is delivered as a PDF alongside the apostilled PDF, so that an online application can be uploaded as a matched pair. Guidance on the wider rules is in Do I need an apostille?