When you need a police record from several countries at once

An applicant for a residence permit in Spain had spent the last seven years like this: three years in Russia, two in Georgia, two in the UAE. The Spanish side requested police records from all three countries where he had lived longer than six months. The client expected to get by with one Russian record and lost more than a month gathering the rest — the UAE record even had to be obtained through an intermediary with a power of attorney.

The logic of the requirement

Many immigration regimes ask you to prove a clean record not only for your country of citizenship but for every country of actual residence over a certain period — usually 5 or 10 years, with a residence threshold of 6 to 12 months. For each such country a separate record is needed, issued under its rules and with its own legalisation: an apostille somewhere, consular legalisation elsewhere, a multi-step procedure through several bodies in the UAE.

Issue times also vary: from several days to several months. From a number of countries a record can be requested only in person, through a consulate, or through an authorised representative. That is why planning starts two to three months before the intended submission, not two weeks.

How to organise the translations

All the records are ultimately translated into the destination country's language and formatted uniformly. It makes sense to run them through a single agency: then the terms (types of records, names of issuing bodies, the phrasing "no information found") will be consistent, and the transliteration of your name identical across all the records and matching your international passport. The legalisation format is specific to each record, but the style and terminology of the translation are best kept common.

Practical tip: draw up a table straight away — country, issuing body, issue time, type of legalisation, validity period. It will show clearly which record to order first (the slowest) and when to launch the translations, so that by the submission date not one record has "aged" and the whole set is ready at the same time.