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Certified Philippine Legal Separation Translation

Certified translation of the documents that record a legal separation in the Philippines, including the registry annotations and endorsements that carry the legal effect and that a reader unfamiliar with the system will otherwise skip.

There is no divorce, so this is the end of the road

The Philippines does not provide divorce for most of its citizens. The available routes are legal separation, declaration of nullity and annulment, and only the last two end the marriage. A legal separation leaves it in existence permanently.

A US office waiting for a Philippine divorce decree to follow a separation is waiting for a document that will never exist. That single fact is the reason this page exists, and it decides eligibility questions that would otherwise be answered wrongly.

Separation, nullity and annulment are three different things

Legal separation under the Family Code separates the parties and their property on stated grounds; the marriage stands. Declaration of nullity holds that the marriage was void from the beginning — most commonly under Article 36, psychological incapacity. Annulment holds a voidable marriage annulled from the date of the judgment.

They produce different decrees with different consequences for legitimacy of children, property and remarriage. We translate the decree as what it says it is and reproduce the article relied on, because the article is the finding.

The PSA annotated marriage certificate

A Philippine decree is only half the evidence. The court decision has to be registered with the Local Civil Registrar and the PSA, after which the PSA issues a marriage certificate on security paper with the decision annotated on it.

Offices generally require that annotated PSA certificate, and an applicant holding only the court decision and the certificate of finality is missing the document that proves the registry gave effect to it.

Muslim Filipinos, and the Code of Muslim Personal Laws

Filipino Muslims are governed by the Code of Muslim Personal Laws, under which divorce is available through the Shari'a courts — talaq, faskh, khul and others — and a Shari'a Circuit Court decree is a Philippine divorce.

So "Filipinos cannot divorce" is true of most and not of all, and the document in front of you settles which. We name the court and the code provision exactly. See our Philippine marriage certificate page.

Ordering, and what the certification covers

Upload the document, choose certified translation at $24.95 per page of up to 250 words, and it comes back typically within 24 hours as a PDF formatted to mirror the original, with a signed certificate of translation accuracy on letterhead. Marginal annotations are translated in place, in the margin, and every seal, stamp and registry endorsement is translated with the text. See how we translate and certified versus standard.

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