With 1.8 million foreign residents, document legalisation is the threshold to settling in Employment in Korea generally calls for a criminal record certificate, and anyone with a history of living abroad must obtain the document from a local authority and then pass it through notarisation and either an apostille or consular legalisation.

Apostille Korea said it has prepared an overseas document agency service for foreign residents and multicultural families in Korea. The company said those who have settled in the country are spending long stretches of time and considerable money simply to have a single document legalised. Korea is home to 1.8 million foreign residents and a multicultural family population of more than 330,000.

The multicultural population has grown while the procedure has not changed

Korea is home to 1.8 million foreign residents and a multicultural family population of more than 330,000. In the past most stays were short term, but the settled population has grown through education, marriage and employment, and its share is rising quickly. The institutional framework, however, has not kept pace, and people continue to lose time and effort during the process of settling in. Discriminatory attitudes and wage issues, compounded by gaps in administrative support, make daily life harder. Ahead of the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, between 2013 and January 2017 eight ice hockey players, three biathletes and one luge athlete were naturalised as Korean nationals, and their original nationalities included the United States, Canada, Russia and Germany. Compared with the pace at which Korean society is taking in members of varied backgrounds, the administrative procedures have yet to catch up.

The time and cost attached to a single document

Employment in Korea generally calls for proof of criminal record. For a Korean national, obtaining the criminal record certificate is not particularly difficult, but the situation differs for anyone with a history of living abroad, because the document has to be obtained in person from a competent authority in the country where the person resided for a given period. Even travelling there to collect it does not end the process. For a foreign document to take effect in Korea it must pass through local notarisation and either an apostille or consular legalisation, and the same applies to recognition of overseas qualifications and to family relationship and marriage records. Having someone on the ground to handle the certification helps, but the documentary requirements, processing times and costs of each embassy are hard to establish precisely, so even a single straightforward document ends up consuming considerable time and money. Apostille Korea said that because local issuance, notarisation, apostille and consular legalisation all require an accurate grasp of each country's administrative requirements and, in some cases, translation into that country's language, the work is better handled through a reputable specialist office.

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Source: SBS CNBC · 2017-05-04