Lost documents: restoring them from another country

Losing a document while living abroad is recoverable in every case. What differs is which office does it and how long you are without it.

A passport

• Report the loss to the local police and obtain the report — several consulates require it, and the local immigration authority certainly will.
• Apply at your consulate for a replacement or, where travel is urgent, an emergency travel document valid for a single journey home.
• Inform the local immigration authority: your residence permit is linked to a passport number, and the link has to be re-established.
• Update the number with banks, and with any registry where your identity document is recorded against an asset.

Civil documents from your home country

Birth, marriage and death certificates are held by the registry that issued them and are reissued as extracts on request.

• Many countries now accept online applications with delivery to a consulate or an address abroad.
• Where personal appearance or a signature is required, a power of attorney to a relative or a lawyer solves it — and the power of attorney itself needs notarising and legalising, which is why one should exist before it is needed.
• Remember that a reissued extract will need apostille or legalisation again, and that the clock on that process starts from scratch.

Diplomas

Held by the issuing institution, which will normally provide a duplicate or a certified transcript. Older institutions and those in countries whose administrative continuity has been interrupted are the difficult cases, and archive services exist for exactly this.

The preventive version

• Scan everything — passports, certificates, diplomas, marriage documents, the apostilles — and keep the scans somewhere you can reach from a phone in another country.
• Keep the physical originals of civil documents in one place and the copies in another.
• Note the issuing office of each document. Half the difficulty in reconstruction is establishing which office to ask.
• Have a general power of attorney in your home country, made while you are there.

Every item on that list takes an hour and removes weeks from a bad month.