French documents for Ukraine: copie intégrale, notarial apostille, divorce without a court

One thing has changed on the French route over the past two years, and it is the authority. If you are reading instructions that say the apostille comes from the prosecutor’s office at the court of appeal, those instructions are out of date: since 1 May 2025 French apostilles are issued by the notariat. The second peculiarity of this route has nothing to do with stamps: a French divorce by mutual consent now mostly happens without a court, so no document called a “court judgment” exists — and the Ukrainian institution is used to asking for exactly that.

Who brings us French documents

• Families — records of births in France, of marriage and of divorce, for the Ukrainian civil registry.
• People who divorced in France — the divorce agreement with its attestation de dépôt, or a judgment if the case did go through a court.
• People who worked in France — employment and earnings statements for the Pension Fund of Ukraine.
• Estate matters — death certificates, notarial deeds, an acte de notoriété, property paperwork.
• Businesses — a Kbis extract, articles of association, corporate resolutions of a French company, for a Ukrainian registrar or bank.
• Education — French diplomas and school certificates, for recognition in Ukraine and for employers.

The other direction — Ukrainian documents for French mairies, préfectures and sworn translators — is covered on our documents for France page.

The 2025 headline: the notary issues the apostille

What to know	Detail
Who issues the apostille	the notariat — 15 regional councils and inter-departmental chambers of notaries
Since when	1 May 2025; before that, the prosecutor general’s office at the court of appeal
Legalisation (for non-Hague states)	the notariat since 1 September 2025, taking over from the French foreign ministry
How to apply	online at apostille.notaires.fr, or in person at one of the 15 centres
Timing	about three working days from the moment the signature is available in the national register of public signatures
Fee	per factsheet F1400 on service-public.gouv.fr — around EUR 10 excl. VAT per act (up to three), EUR 5 from the fourth, EUR 20 for 24-hour service; the tariff is revised, so check before paying
Enough for Ukraine	yes: both states are parties to the 1961 Hague Convention, so no consular legalisation is needed

Two practical consequences follow from that table.

First. The notary checks the signature on the document against the national register of public signatures, and the clock starts not when you apply but when the relevant signature is actually available there. If your document was signed by an official whose specimen is not yet in the register, the case drags — which is a reason to ask the notariat about the state of the check, not a reason to order the document again.

Second. The handover date was postponed three times: first planned for 1 September 2023, then 1 January 2025, and only from 1 May 2025 did the apostille genuinely pass to the notariat. As a result three generations of instructions coexist online. Trust the official portal apostille.notaires.fr over translation-agency articles — ours included.

Which form of the record to order

A French civil-status record comes in several forms, and the cost of getting it wrong is a repeat order from Ukraine plus a second apostille.

Form	What it contains	For Ukraine
Copie intégrale	the full copy of the record with marginal annotations (marriage, divorce, name change)	what you need for the civil registry, courts, notaries
Extrait avec filiation	your details and your parents’ details, nothing more	sometimes enough — ask the institution
Extrait sans filiation	the person’s details only	usually not enough for a Ukrainian institution
Extrait plurilingue	the multilingual form	no Ukrainian, and the apostille is still required

Where to order: the record is issued by the mairie of the place where the event occurred. If the event happened outside France but was registered by the French authorities, it comes from the Service central d’état civil in Nantes. Orders are taken online and the document is posted out on paper — and paper is what matters, because a Ukrainian notary binds the translation to the physical document; a digital copy with a verification code will not do for filing.

On freshness. Ukrainian law sets no explicit limit, but institutions in practice want a record no more than three months old. Plan so that ordering the record, the notarial apostille, the postage and the translation all fit inside that window — otherwise the document goes stale after you have already paid for it twice.

The French divorce with no court judgment

This is the case where translation is the easy part.

Since 2017 a French divorce by mutual consent usually takes place outside court: the spouses conclude an agreement (convention de divorce), lawyers for both sides countersign it, and the agreement is then deposited with a notary. The notary checks the form — whether the reflection period was observed, whether the mandatory clauses and annexes are present — but does not approve its substance; approval by a judge is no longer required. The marriage is dissolved as of the date of deposit.

What that means for a Ukrainian institution:

• There is no court judgment. Asking for a “court decision dissolving the marriage” in such a case is pointless — nobody will issue one.
• Proof of divorce is the attestation de dépôt — the notary’s certificate of deposit naming the spouses and the date. Article 229-1 of the French Civil Code expressly recognises this document as proof for third parties.
• File the set: the divorce agreement and the attestation de dépôt, each with an apostille and a notarised Ukrainian translation.
• The annotation. The divorce is entered as a marginal annotation on the French marriage record and on the spouses’ birth records — so the second, often simpler option is to order a fresh copie intégrale of the marriage record showing the divorce annotation.

Ukrainian institutions are inconsistent here: some accept an attestation de dépôt without comment, others are seeing a French out-of-court divorce for the first time. So get the requirement in writing, before you order the apostille in France. The wider logic — when a foreign divorce needs recognition by a Ukrainian court and when filing with the civil registry is enough — is in our article on foreign court decisions in Ukraine.

If there is a judgment: the certificat de non-appel

Where the divorce did go through a court (contested divorce, a case with a foreign element, cases involving children), the text of the judgment alone is usually not enough for a Ukrainian institution: it needs confirmation that the judgment is final.

In France that is the certificat de non-appel — a certificate from the court clerk (greffier) stating that no appeal has been registered as at the date of the request. It is applied for on form cerfa No. 12821, and the clerk issues it once satisfied that the appeal period has expired. One detail the official notice to the form states plainly: it is for the applicant to make sure that the notification which starts the appeal period was actually served. For an out-of-court divorce by mutual consent no such certificate exists — there is no appeal to speak of.

So the set for a Ukrainian institution looks like this: the judgment, the certificat de non-appel, a notarial apostille on each document, and a notarised Ukrainian translation.

Nom de naissance and nom d’usage

The French naming system produces a discrepancy Ukrainian documents simply do not have. The nom de naissance is the birth surname: the only one that appears in civil-status records and passes to children. The nom d’usage is the spouse’s surname, usable in daily life; on an identity document it is added to the birth surname rather than replacing it. Hence the entry on a married woman’s passport: “BIRTH SURNAME + ép.HUSBAND’S SURNAME”.

The abbreviation “ép.” (épouse, “spouse of”) has no direct equivalent and is legible only to French speakers; French parliamentary questions record the confusion it causes in foreign administrations. For the Ukrainian civil registry or pension fund it means one simple thing: the document carries a surname that is not in the Ukrainian passport.

The rule is the same as on every other route: in the translation the surname is written exactly as in the Ukrainian passport, the French form and the meaning of “ép.” are explained in a translator’s note, and no third variant is invented. That is why we ask for a scan of the passport or an earlier translation along with the document. If the discrepancy is already in your papers, the way out is in our guide to a name spelled differently across documents.

Kbis and corporate documents

The Kbis extract is issued by the registry of the commercial court (greffe du tribunal de commerce), and the apostille follows the signature — which means the same new rules, i.e. a notary. What matters for a Ukrainian registrar or bank:

• You need the official paper extract signed by the clerk, not the free reference view from the website.
• Freshness — in practice no older than three months; banks want it fresher.
• Entity forms are not translated: SAS, SARL and SA keep their original spelling, with the legal form explained.

The EU-wide picture is collected separately in EU corporate documents for Ukraine.

What Ukrainian law requires of the translation

Article 15 of Law No. 755-IV requires documents to be filed in the state language, and a document in a foreign language to be accompanied by a Ukrainian translation whose accuracy, or the authenticity of the translator’s signature, has been certified in the prescribed manner. In practice that means notarial certification: an agency stamp is fine for internal use, but not for a registrar or the civil registry.

French translation starts at UAH 450 per standard page (1,800 characters with spaces). Notarial certification is UAH 400 per document and the agency stamp UAH 100. The full list is on our prices page.

Common mistakes

• Looking for a court of appeal to issue the apostille. Since 1 May 2025 it is the notariat.
• Having a pre-May-2025 apostille reissued. It is valid as it stands.
• Ordering an extrait sans filiation. The civil registry needs the full record — a copie intégrale.
• Asking for a “court judgment” on a French mutual-consent divorce. There is none; the proof is the attestation de dépôt.
• Filing a judgment without a certificat de non-appel. Without confirmation that it is final, the set is incomplete.
• Carrying “ép.SURNAME” into the Ukrainian document as the surname. That creates a mismatch with the passport.
• Expecting the multilingual form to remove the translation. Ukrainian is not one of its languages.

How we handle it

We start with the question of where you are filing and what exactly the institution asked for: that decides which form of the French record to order and whether an apostille is needed at all. Where a divorce is involved, we establish before anything is ordered whether it was judicial or out-of-court — the whole set depends on that. We then translate from French directly, align the spelling of names with your earlier documents, have the translation notarised, and hand over a set ready to file.

For civil-status records that means notarised birth certificate translation and notarised marriage certificate translation; for judgments and agreements, legal translation; for extracts and articles of association, corporate document translation; and when a stamp is needed on a Ukrainian document travelling the other way, apostille and legalisation.

Send us the scans and the name of the institution asking for them, and you will have a quote within 15 minutes.