[ArZeta]

Hi everyone,

New to this forum.

Me and my wife have been living in Belgium this year. She is Australian and I am a British citizen studying in Belgium for my masters. Today we sent off our application to the home office as we had an appointment at the visa centre.

However, the major problem is we submitted a photocopy of our marriage certificate not an original nor a certified copy from the issuing centre, because the person who worked there said it's okay, a photocopy is fine and you don't need to submit a proper certified copy. However, reading on this forum made me realise what she said is probably wrong. It's so frustrating as we had a certified copy from the issuing centre with us during the appointment!

Is there any chance our application can get accepted despite this if everything else is okay? We had a lawyer work on our application so I assume all our other processes are okay. Does it help that our marriage certificate was issued in London and so the home office can potentially check to see that it is legitimate?

Really worried that it will be rejected and we will have to resubmit as we had planned to be in the UK in a couple of weeks. What are our chances?

Thanks for all your help. Wish I checked this forum prior to going to our appointment.

 

[Joppa]

Probably. Home Office seems to be accepting copies more and more, especially with the introduction of scanning service of documents. We still recommend you submit original documents.

 

[emu77]

Hi everyone,

New to this forum.

Me and my wife have been living in Belgium this year. She is Australian and I am a British citizen studying in Belgium for my masters. Today we sent off our application to the home office as we had an appointment at the visa centre.

However, the major problem is we submitted a photocopy of our marriage certificate not an original nor a certified copy from the issuing centre, because the person who worked there said it's okay, a photocopy is fine and you don't need to submit a proper certified copy. However, reading on this forum made me realise what she said is probably wrong. It's so frustrating as we had a certified copy from the issuing centre with us during the appointment!

Is there any chance our application can get accepted despite this if everything else is okay? We had a lawyer work on our application so I assume all our other processes are okay. Does it help that our marriage certificate was issued in London and so the home office can potentially check to see that it is legitimate?

Really worried that it will be rejected and we will have to resubmit as we had planned to be in the UK in a couple of weeks. What are our chances?

Thanks for all your help. Wish I checked this forum prior to going to our appointment.

I can't speak from exact experience, as I applied from Canada, but the Toronto VAC only accepts copies, even when I told them they could keep some of the originals they would only take the copies, including our marriage certificate. I think they take less of an issue with copies from certain countries so you may be OK, but you can always contact them to ask (albeit they are not the most helpful and you'll have to pay to contact them).

 

[ArZeta]

I can't speak from exact experience, as I applied from Canada, but the Toronto VAC only accepts copies, even when I told them they could keep some of the originals they would only take the copies, including our marriage certificate. I think they take less of an issue with copies from certain countries so you may be OK, but you can always contact them to ask (albeit they are not the most helpful and you'll have to pay to contact them).

Thank you for the reply! Were your copies certified or just standard scanned copies?

 

[emu77]

Thank you for the reply! Were your copies certified or just standard scanned copies?

Just standard scanned copies. The VFS global website only specified that we needed to bring originals and copies, but did not mention anywhere that they would only be accepting the copies, therefore we assumed we'd still be handing over all originals. The woman who looked over my documents didn't even ask to see the originals to verify they were the same, and if she saw anything that had a "live" signature, even when it was clearly a printout, she would not accept it. This seems to be a procedure that's being adopted more and more so they can cut costs on sending back originals.