Hello all,
I've been in dubai a few weeks now and thought I would share this tidbit of info.
I've learned from many sources how to go about attesting my marriage certificate. The steps I followed were
1. Get marriage certificate attested by the local foreign affairs government body (in my case the Australian department of foreign affairs)
2. Then send my certificate to the UAE consulate in my country for authentication.

That's all I thought I had to do.

Today, my residency application was rejected because my marriage certificate needed to be attested by the UAE Foreign Affairs department! NOT my home UAE embassy!!!!!


Which, to my mind, makes my week of waiting for the UAE embassy back home to authenticate it, a big fat waste of time!!!!!!


I would still advise strongly to everyone to get everything attested at your local UAE embassy, but this has p!ssed me right off - after going to all the effort to get all my documents in order and according to the UAE representatives back in Australia, i'd gone through everything correctly...only to discover that when I applied for residency, the UAE government didn't care that it had been authenticated back home, and that it all needs to be attested here in Dubai!


arg!
/end rant