Background
Mr. [P] [U], born in Albania in 2003, arrived in France in 2016 as an unaccompanied minor and was placed in the care of child welfare services in February 2017. In June 2020, he made a declaration seeking to acquire French nationality under Article 21-12, paragraph 3, item 1, of the Civil Code.
After registration of the declaration was refused, Mr. [U] sued the public prosecutor. The Nancy Court of Appeal held on January 27, 2025, that he had acquired French nationality through his declaration. The prosecutor appealed to the Court of Cassation, challenging the treatment of Mr. [U]’s Albanian birth certificate and its two-step authentication and apostille.
The Court’s Holding
The Court of Cassation dismissed the appeal. It held that the translation requirement under the French decree governing nationality declarations applied to the underlying foreign public document, not to the apostille itself. The birth certificate was issued on a multilingual form that included French, while the apostille was completed in English, a language permitted under the 1961 Hague Apostille Convention.
The Court also upheld the appellate court’s assessment that the two-stage certification adequately established the certificate’s authenticity. A prefectural official authenticated the civil registrar’s signature and seal, and Albania’s foreign affairs ministry then authenticated the prefectural official’s signature and seal. Additional evidence, including a 2021 attestation from the Albanian ministry confirming the apostille’s authenticity and the authority of the relevant official, reinforced that conclusion. These factual findings legally supported the ruling that Mr. [U] had acquired French nationality.
Key Takeaways
- An apostille may not be rejected merely because it is written in a language other than French; the Hague Convention permits it to be completed in the issuing authority’s official language.
- French translation requirements for nationality proceedings apply to the underlying foreign public document, not to the apostille itself.
- A two-step authentication chain can establish the authenticity of a foreign civil-status document when the successive certifications clearly connect the original official’s signature and seal to the final apostille.
Why It Matters
The judgment clarifies how French courts should assess foreign civil-status records in nationality cases. It distinguishes between the language requirements applicable to an underlying document and those applicable to its apostille, preventing an apostille from being rejected solely because it has not been translated into French.
It also confirms that apostilles should generally be accepted unless serious irregularities exist and that courts may consider the full authentication chain and corroborating official evidence when evaluating whether a foreign record is reliable.