A client who was born in the Eastern Borderlands before World War II and has been living in South America for several dozen years came to our office. He obtained a decision confirming his Polish citizenship and wanted to apply for a Polish passport, but he needed to present a Polish birth certificate at the consulate, therefore he asked for help in transcribing the birth certificate originally registered in Ukraine.
The main problem in this case was the discrepancy between the data of the client’s parents included in the decision confirming the client’s Polish citizenship and those entered in the Ukrainian birth certificate (Ukrainian equivalents of the parents’ names were used there). In situations of discrepancies in the data contained in the decision on citizenship and in the birth certificate, it is usually necessary to carry out one of two procedures: changing the content of the administrative decision or rectifying the birth certificate (which, however, requires obtaining and submitting other civil status certificates, in this case – regarding the client’s parents). Each of these procedures would lead to increased costs and prolongation of the proceedings in the entire case. However, the case in question was completed without the above-mentioned additional formalities.
Thanks to the discovery of the former passports of the client’s parents, on which their data appeared in a form consistent with the content of the decision on the client’s citizenship, the Law Firm’s team asked a sworn translator of the Ukrainian language to transcribe the names of his parents in the translation of the client’s birth certificate based on travel documents or their copies- i.e. in the form of Polish equivalents of their names, based on Art. 14 section 2 of the Act on the profession of sworn translator. On the basis of such a sworn translation, the Civil Registry Office was able to register the client’s birth certificate with his parents’ data identical to those included in the decision on citizenship, which contributed to speeding up and simplifying the entire procedure and, as a consequence, allowed the client to obtain Polish passport without any problems.