A working group is meeting next month in the Hague to consider the authentication of documents issued by intergovernmental or supranational organizations. One of the preliminary documents published by the Hague Conference in advance of the meeting provides several methods by which such documents can be authenticated:
(more…)
The case of the day is Estate of Aquino (Mount Vernon N.Y. City Ct. 2017). Aquino married in New York in 1986 and died in 2011, survived by a wife and seven children. In 2012, the wife petitioned the court for letters of administration allowing her to administer his estate, which the court granted. The wife, though, had given notice of her petition to only three of the children. In 2014, one of the sons who had not received notice sought to revoke the letters of administration and to have himself appointed as administrator on the grounds that his father and his father’s wife were divorced in 1993 in the Dominican Republic.
The case of the day is Hajdinyak v. O’Connell (Mass. App. Div. 2106). Lisa-Marie O’Connell and her family went on a vacation in Aruba. On the beach, she saw a dog, Coco, who was “dehydrated and in distress.” She cared for the dog and took it to the veterinarian, who told her that the dog was not microchipped and could not be identified. She took Coco home with her. Later, Cornelia Hajdinyak and Howard Tromp, who lived in Aruba, claimed that the dog, named Whitey, belonged to them. But O’Connell refused to return the dog, so Hajdinyak and Tromp brought a replevin action.
(more…)
The Hague Conference has published the Conclusions and Recommendations of the 2016 Special Commission on the operation of the Apostille Convention. Here are a few issues that may be of particular interest:
(more…)
The Special Commission on the Practical Operation of the Hague Apostille Commission will be meeting at the Peace Palace beginning this week. Here are a few of the key documents:
(more…)
I saw an ad recently for a company called Notarize, Inc. Here is the pitch:
Thanks to the commonwealth of Virginia, no matter where you live in the U.S., your documents can now be notarized online by a trusted notary.
Upload and annotate any document, verify your identity, and connect with an eNotary in minutes. All handled securely through the Notarize app. Once done, print or share your notarized document electronically.
Notarize from anywhere in the world with your device. All you need is a webcam, Valid ID, and your document.
I haven’t heard much from Brazil recently—I wonder what’s going on down there? (more…)
I’m happy to welcome first-time guest poster Larissa Pochmann of the Universidade Candido Mendes, with a post on Brazil’s recent accession to the Hague Apostille Convention. Welcome, Larissa!
The Apostille Convention, also known as the Hague Convention Abolishing the Requirement of Legalization for Foreign Public Documents, was drafted by the Hague Conference on Private International Law. There are eighty members of the Hague Conference (79 states and one Regional Economic Integration Organization) and 68 non-member states are connected with the Conference. According to the State Department’s helpful explanation, apostilles authenticate the seals and signatures of officials on public documents, which are documents originating from a court, a clerk of court, a public prosecutor or process server, and also administrative documents, notarial acts, and official certificates placed on documents. A public document with an apostille will be recognized in foreign countries that are parties to the Convention, regardless of the official language of the issuing country and without a requirement of diplomatic or consular legalization.
(more…)
The case of the day is In re Barkats (Bankr. D.D.C. 2014). In early 2014, several creditors of Pierre Philippe Barkats filed an involuntary bankruptcy petition. They served it on him by “delivery through owner and co-resident” at a home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, which Barkats’s lawyer had listed as Barkats’s address in a document filed with the District of Columbia Superior Court in an unrelated case. But the lawyer later averred that he had given the address solely as an address for receiving mail in the Superior Court action and that Barkat lived in France. After Barkat failed to answer the petition and the creditors obtained an order for relief, Barkats moved to vacate the order on the grounds that he had never been served with the petition.
(more…)
The case of the day is Bruton v. Texas (Tex. Ct. Crim. App. 2014). The defendant, Peter Cain Bruton, was found guilty of aggravated sexual assault of a child and sentenced to imprisonment for life. At his sentencing, the prosecution had sought to introduce documents purporting to be public records from England showing that Bruton had been previously convicted of crimes in the Crown Court in Norwich, an INTERPOL record purporting to show that he had previously convicted of crimes in the UK, and a letter from a Data Protection Disclosure Unit Officer of the Norfolk Constabulary to the Denton County (Texas) District Attorney’s Office purporting to show that he had previously been convicted twelve times for indecent assaults on a young girl or girls.
(more…)
Please subscribe to our “Clients and Colleagues” newsletter, which we typically send approximately quarterly, and to Letters Blogatory, the award-winning blog on international judicial assistance, which is updated more regularly.
.jpg){kind=link}
