Legalising Your Documents: Apostille or Superlegalisation

Of the ten to sixteen weeks between signing a contract and starting work, the part most often blown is not the ministry decision — that is fixed by law and simply has to be waited out. It is document legalisation, because it runs on your side, in parallel, and nobody chases it for you.

It is also where the most common single defect appears, and the defect is trivial: your name spelled differently on different documents. Passport says one thing, diploma says another, police certificate a third. The file is not assessed until it is coherent, so one letter can cost a month. Check this before you start, not after.

The Pakistani case is worth pausing on because it is counter-intuitive and it is exactly the sort of thing an agent will get wrong. Convention membership is a fact about the country. Whether a particular embassy accepts apostilles in a particular procedure is a separate fact, and here the two do not line up. Verify with the embassy that will actually receive your file, not with a general article about the Hague Convention.

• Criminal record / police clearance certificate from your country of nationality, and from any country you lived in for more than six months in the last three years
• Proof of qualification — diploma, trade certificate — for skilled roles. Unskilled roles generally do not need one
• Birth and marriage certificates, where relevant, particularly for later family reunification

Your passport itself is not legalised. Your employment contract is issued by a Czech employer and does not go through this process either.

After legalisation, documents that are not in Czech normally need an official translation. Budget for that as a separate step and a separate cost — it is small, but it is often discovered late.

Note the Nepali cap of ten documents per person. If you are legalising for yourself and planning family reunification later, that limit shapes the order you do things in.

1. Compare the name on every document against your passport, character by character. Middle names, initials, transliterations of the same name, surname first versus last. This is the number one defect.
2. Check your passport has more than eighteen months left. Renewing mid-process restarts documents that reference the passport number.
3. Check the date of issue on your police certificate. These expire for the purposes of the application; a certificate obtained too early is as useless as none.
4. Start before the offer is final. Legalisation runs in parallel with the employer's 30-day labour-market advertising period. Nothing is lost by starting early.
5. Keep the originals with you and give nobody your only copy. In the Indian fraud cases the recurring first move is the agent taking the original passport.