Before Your Spouse Can Apply, Your Marriage Has to Exist in Portugal

A marriage celebrated in the United States does not exist in the Portuguese civil registry until somebody puts it there. Until that happens, your spouse cannot claim Portuguese citizenship through you, because the fact the whole application rests on is not on the record.

This is the step that surprises almost every couple. The certificate from the county clerk is genuine, the marriage is real, and neither of those things is the point. Portugal decides civil status from its own registry, and its registry only knows what has been entered into it.

In this article:

• 1. Why does the marriage have to be registered in Portugal first?
• 1. What registering a foreign marriage actually means
• 1. The order that works, and the order that fails
• 1. What stops a marriage from being registered
• 1. What the registry checks in the marriage certificate
• 1. When does the clock on the marriage start?
• 1. Frequently asked questions
• 1. Conclusion

Why does the marriage have to be registered in Portugal first?

Because the spouse route is not a claim about a relationship. It is a claim about a legal fact, and legal facts about Portuguese citizens have to appear on the Portuguese record before an authority can build on them.

When your spouse applies, the registrar looks you up. If the registry shows you as single, or still married to a former spouse, or married to someone with a different spelling of the name that appears on the application, the file has nothing solid to attach to. It does not matter how well documented the marriage is in the United States. The Portuguese record is what the Portuguese registrar reads.

This is also why the order cannot be reversed. The marriage is not registered as a consequence of the citizenship application; the citizenship application is only possible once the marriage is registered.

What registering a foreign marriage actually means

The Portuguese word for it is transcrição, and in plain English it means copying a foreign civil event onto the Portuguese record so that Portugal treats it as its own.

You are not marrying again. Nothing about the wedding is re-examined and nobody has to travel. What happens is that a Portuguese conservatory, or a consulate acting as one, receives the foreign marriage certificate, checks that it is properly legalized and translated, checks that the parties were free to marry, and enters the marriage into the Portuguese record of the Portuguese spouse.

From that moment on, a Portuguese marriage certificate exists for a wedding that took place in New Jersey, California or Massachusetts. That certificate is what the citizenship application will use.

The order that works, and the order that fails

Most failed spouse applications are not wrong on the merits. They were simply filed at the wrong point in a sequence.

| Step | What has to be true first | What it makes possible | |---|---|---| | 1. The Portuguese spouse is on the record as Portuguese | Descent or another route already registered | There is a Portuguese citizen for the marriage to attach to | | 2. Any earlier marriage is closed on the record | A foreign divorce confirmed by a Portuguese court | The registry sees a person free to marry | | 3. The current marriage is transcribed | Certificate legalized, translated, no impediment | A Portuguese marriage certificate exists | | 4. The spouse files for citizenship | The marriage is on the record and has lasted the required period | The application has a valid fact to rely on |

Step two is where American families stall most often. If the Portuguese spouse was divorced abroad and that divorce was never confirmed by a Portuguese court, the registry still sees the earlier marriage as open, and a second marriage cannot be entered on top of it.

What stops a marriage from being registered

Four obstacles account for nearly all refusals, and none of them is about the couple.

An earlier marriage that Portugal still shows as open. A decision from a court outside the European Union has no effect on the Portuguese registry until a Portuguese appellate court reviews and confirms it (article 978 of the Civil Procedure Code). Until that is done, the previous marriage stands here, whatever the American decree says.

Documents in the wrong form. A marriage certificate must arrive with an apostille and a complete certified translation. Complete is stricter than it sounds: seals, stamps, marginal annotations and the apostille text itself are all part of the document.

Names that do not match. Portuguese emigrant families anglicized surnames as a matter of course, and women appear under a maiden name in one record and a married name in the next. If the person on the marriage certificate cannot be matched with confidence to the person on the Portuguese birth record, the transcription stops.

The Portuguese spouse is not registered. People who assume they are Portuguese because a parent was born in Portugal are sometimes not yet registered as such. If the Portuguese spouse's own record does not exist, there is nothing to transcribe the marriage into.

What the registry checks in the marriage certificate

Not romance, and not evidence of a shared life. The registry is verifying a short list of facts.

It checks the full identity of both parties, including parents' names, which is why abstract or short-form certificates so often fall short. It checks the date and place of the celebration. It checks the civil status each party declared at the time of the marriage, and whether that declaration is consistent with what the Portuguese record already holds. And it checks that the document is an official record issued by the competent authority, not a commemorative certificate from the ceremony.

Where an American certificate exists in two versions, the fuller one is the one to order. The abstract is usually the version families have in a drawer, and it is usually the version that comes back.

When does the clock on the marriage start?

The spouse route is not available on the day of the wedding. The law asks for a minimum period of marriage before the application can be made, and the marriage has to be on the Portuguese record when the application goes in.

Those two conditions are separate, and confusing them is common. Couples who married years ago sometimes assume that because the marriage is old, everything is in place, and discover at filing that the marriage was never transcribed. Couples who transcribed promptly sometimes assume the transcription itself starts a clock. Which dates count in a particular file depends on the facts of that file, and it is one of the first things our assessment settles.

At Fluxia Law, the review of foreign decisions and the administrative route to Portuguese citizenship are our central practice, and this sequence is where most of the avoidable delay in a family's plans is created.

Frequently asked questions

Can we register the marriage at a Portuguese consulate in the United States? A consulate can receive and process the transcription of a foreign marriage. What a consulate cannot do is accept a foreign divorce that no Portuguese court has confirmed, which is why files with an earlier marriage stall there.

Does my spouse need to live in Portugal to apply through our marriage? The route through marriage to a Portuguese citizen does not turn on where the couple lives. It turns on the marriage being registered here and on the conditions the law attaches to it.

We were married in a religious ceremony abroad. Does that change anything? What matters is the civil record produced by the competent authority in that country. If the ceremony generated a valid civil marriage record there, that record is what is transcribed.

Do we need to translate the whole certificate, or only the main text? The whole document. Incomplete translations, missing the seals and marginal notes, are a routine cause of a file being sent back.

Conclusion

The spouse route is not difficult, but it is unforgiving about order. A marriage that exists everywhere except in the Portuguese registry cannot support an application, and no amount of supporting evidence substitutes for the entry itself.

Before gathering anything for a spouse's file, the useful question is narrower than it seems: what does the Portuguese record currently say about the Portuguese spouse's civil status? Everything else follows from that answer.

Read also

• One Family, Three Cases: Citizenship for Him, for His Wife, for the Children
• Married Abroad, Living in Portugal: Making Your Family Status Official
• Transcribe, Recognize, Transcribe: The Three-Step Order Nobody Explains