The Apostille Convention took effect for Vietnam on 11 September 2026

For a Vietnamese diploma or judicial record produced in one of the states the Convention now reaches from Vietnam, the foreign consulate has dropped out of the chain. Article 3 allows the receiving state to require one certificate and nothing else, issued by the competent authority of the state the document comes from, in place of the consular formality that Article 2 defines. The Convention took effect for Vietnam on 11 September 2026.

What the single certificate replaces

Article 2 of the Convention of 5 October 1961 abolishing the requirement of legalisation for foreign public documents defines the thing being abolished, and the definition is narrow. Legalisation means only the formality by which the diplomatic or consular agents of the country where a document is to be produced certify the signature, the capacity in which the signatory acted and the identity of the seal or stamp. Article 3 then says the only formality that may be required in its place is the certificate described in Article 4.

Article 5 sets the limits of what that certificate says. It is issued at the request of the signatory or of any bearer, it certifies the signature, the capacity and the seal, and its own signature, seal and stamp are exempt from all certification. On the Government’s portal the Vietnamese decree is explicit in the same direction, because an apostille certificate does not certify the content or the form of the document.

What Vietnam has put in place

The Government issued Decree No. 293/2026/NĐ-CP on 23 July 2026 to implement the Convention. The text of the decree was not read for this article, so every description of what it provides — here, and in the two sections that follow — is what the Government’s own portal published about it.

The portal names the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as the competent authority. The Minister designates the body that issues the certificate, and sets the criteria, conditions and roadmap for delegating that power to provincial People’s Committees. The portal describes two filing routes, one in person at the one-stop section or by post, and one conducted entirely online through the National Public Service Portal or the national identity application. Nothing read here establishes that either route was open on any particular date, or which office now signs.

Which documents are inside it

The portal lists four categories of Vietnamese public document that may be apostilled, and adds a residual fifth. The first category is judicial and enforcement documents. The second is administrative documents, which holds civil-status, nationality and adoption papers, judicial record certificates, diplomas and study certificates, and health documents. The third is notarised instruments. The fourth covers certified copies, certified signatures and certified contracts.

Four classes sit outside that certification. The first is documents made by Vietnamese diplomatic or consular officers. The second is administrative documents directly related to commercial or customs activity. Documents in that class which were eligible for consular certification before the Convention took effect for Vietnam are carved out of it, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is to list them. The third is documents that were neither made by a competent body nor notarised or certified. The fourth is foreign public documents.

Two of those four classes track the Convention’s own exclusions in Article 1, which leaves out documents executed by diplomatic or consular agents and administrative documents dealing directly with commercial or customs operations. How that carve-out sits against the treaty exclusion is not addressed by anything read here.

The exclusion of foreign public documents is about what Vietnam certifies, not about what Vietnam accepts. The portal says the decree also governs the receipt and use in Vietnam of documents apostilled by other member states.

Three member states are outside the arrangement

The arrangement does not reach every member of the Convention. The Government’s portal quotes the decree’s scope clause, under which the certificate applies to public documents circulating between Vietnam and a member state “có quan hệ áp dụng với Việt Nam” — one that has applicable relations with Vietnam. Reading that phrase as the Article 12 limit is this article’s reading, not the portal’s.

Article 12 explains how a member can fall outside it. The second paragraph provides that an accession “shall have effect only as regards the relations between the acceding State and those Contracting States which have not raised an objection to its accession in the six months after the receipt of the notification referred to in sub-paragraph d) of Article 15”. The third paragraph sets the commencement date on the sixtieth day after that six-month period expires.

Three states used the second paragraph. Germany’s notification of 20 May 2026 says that the Federal Republic of Germany “raises an objection to the accession of the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam in accordance with Article 12 (2) of the Convention”. Austria’s, of 19 June, and Czechia’s, of 2 July, are to the same effect and cite the same paragraph. On the depositary’s notifications page, read on 15 September 2026, those three are the only entries under the objection heading, and none of them gives a reason.

So the Convention entered into force for Vietnam with every Contracting State that did not object, and as between Vietnam and those three it did not enter into force. A document bound for Germany, Austria or Czechia is not inside the single-certificate scheme.

Where the record stops

Vietnam’s Ministry of Justice reports that the Netherlands notified the deposit on 13 January 2026 and that the six-month objection window ran to 13 July. Sixty days after that is 11 September, which is the date the depositary’s own status table gives. The check holds, on a chronology reported by the ministry rather than the depositary, and on the assumption that notification and receipt fell on the same date.

Three things are not settled. None of the three objecting states gave a reason, so nothing can be said about what would change an objection. Article 12 as read says nothing about withdrawing one, so the position should be described neither as permanent nor as temporary. And nothing read here says what applies between Vietnam and those three states instead.