The German Embassy has determined that the requirements for the legalization of public documents are not met for documents issued in Ghana, Sierra Leone and Liberia. A high percentage of the documents presented are incorrect in terms of content. In addition, forged or falsified documents are regularly presented to the embassy. Therefore, with the approval of the Foreign Office, legalization by the embassy was discontinued.

In principle, the domestic German authorities are free to accept the documents issued by these countries as genuine and to trust their contents by means of a free assessment of evidence (§ 438 I ZPO) without further verification.

For Ghana, it is possible to have the Ghanaian civil status documents and court judgments checked as part of a document verification procedure.

You can find more information about this procedure here.

There is currently no possibility of document verification for Sierra Leone and Liberia. It is therefore at the discretion of the domestic authority to decide on the usability of these documents.

The Foreign Office has informed the German Federal Ministries of Justice and the Interior about this situation and asked them to pass on the information to the responsible state authorities/registry offices.