How and why to report a foreign marriage or divorce to government agencies in your home country

According to the World Population Review website, in 2025, there will be 2 people of Russian descent living in the United States. This data does not include those who do not live in America but have married, divorced, had a child, and successfully left the country. This article is about what you need to know if you are getting married or going through a divorce abroad. Especially if you got married in another country but intend to return to Russia, or are dissolving a marriage that was once registered in the Russian Federation.

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If earlier all that needed to be done when registering or dissolving a marriage abroad was to put an apostille on the marriage certificate, then since 2018 this alone is no longer enough. This is stated in the Rules for maintaining the Unified State Register (USR). In The Unified State Register includes information on documents issued abroad in relation to citizens of the Russian Federation. All document flow is carried out strictly in Russian, and each record compiled is assigned a unique number.

The information contained in the Unified State Register is subject to permanent storage, its destruction and seizure are not allowed. It is not public and is protected by the law "On personal data": information is provided upon request to judicial and law enforcement agencies, civil registry offices, multifunctional centers for the provision of state and municipal services (MFC), consular offices of the Russian Federation and other government agencies.

Entering information into the Unified State Register is the responsibility of a citizen of the Russian Federation living abroad. The law regulates a period of one month for providing information on the fact of registration of a civil status act abroad. But to date, the deadlines established by law are not too strict, and there are no sanctions for violating them yet.

However, the consequences of failure to comply with these simple rules can be most unpredictable. In particular, in my practice there was a case where a marriage concluded abroad, but not registered in the Unified State Register, was recognized as invalid by a Russian court, with all the negative legal consequences that follow from this fact, including the impossibility of dividing property, as well as spousal support (collection of alimony), inheritance, etc. The decision withstood the appeal, leaving both parties in an ambiguous position.

On the subject: Certificate of Previously Issued Passports, or Adventures of Russian-Speaking Pensioners in the USA

If informing Russian authorities about a foreign marriage is important, then informing Russian authorities about a foreign divorce is doubly important. The fact is that if the parties registered a marriage in Russia and dissolved it abroad, the registry office that registered the marriage may never find out about this dissolution. That is, according to Russian documents, everything will look as if the parties are still married, which may entail problems in the subsequent purchase or sale of real estate, in matters of inheritance or entering into a new marriage, as well as problems associated with the bad faith of not only the spouses themselves, but also third parties.

For example, in my practice there was a case where a woman got married in the USA and got divorced in the USA. Realizing that life in America did not work out for her, she returned to her native Russian village in the Orenburg region, met the love of her life there and legally remarried. It would be fair to say that she lived a happy life, because the problems began after her death. When this woman died, the circle of heirs included her surviving husband, a daughter they shared with their husband, and the mother of the deceased woman. However, the husband did not agree with this circle and pretended that he was not married at all, and everything that was acquired by the backbreaking labor of both spouses should belong to him alone.

He was able to claim this after he had found an American marriage certificate in his beloved wife's files while going through her papers. The deceived and insulted husband filed a lawsuit to have their marriage declared invalid on the grounds that at the time of their marriage, his wife was already in another registered marriage, so their marriage, concluded later, should be declared invalid by the court. Consequently, the property acquired by non-spouses should belong to him personally.

The court found no evidence of the dissolution of the American marriage, so the judge satisfied the demands of the offended spouse in full. Only by the time of the appeal hearing of the case by a higher court did his mother-in-law find contacts our office in the US, and I, in turn, made a number of inquiries and found in the archives of the American judicial system a court decision on a divorce from twenty years ago. Justice has prevailed.

Let's simulate a situation. If the law of that time had provided for the obligation to register foreign marriages and divorces in the Unified State Register, then the wife would have had to take care of it herself in a timely manner so that information about her American marriage, especially about the subsequent divorce, would be included in the national registers. And after the death of this woman, her relatives would not have to hire lawyers on both sides of the ocean, pay a lot of money, waste time and nerves on proving the fact of divorce. This information would simply be stored in the register by default. And if the woman decided to ignore the requirements of the law and not inform the Russian authorities about her American past, then it could be said that she created problems for her daughter and her own mother with her own hands. But this is not the case. There is no one to blame for what happened. Perhaps this is the husband's dishonesty (if he knew about the divorce), and perhaps an absurd accident (if he really did not know). Perhaps it is wrong and frivolous to put your life and well-being, as well as the future of your relatives, at the mercy of chance.

The forms of notification forms are approved by the Order of the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation dated 2019. On the territory of the Russian Federation, all these forms are available at any civil registry office, but if you live abroad and want to put your documents in order, then you can get the necessary forms, as well as professional assistance in filling them out and legalizing them, at our office.

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