Your attorney is right: the mail is unreliable. Even when we did our fingerprints at the American Embassy in Lisbon, we were specifically told by the embassy staff not to use CTT to send the fingerprint cards back to the U.S. DOJ for processing. UPS got it there in three days.
Hope your cards would come soon. My attorney said it could be as soon as two months from the date of the appointment, but I am not that optimistic. Overall, though, things are improving at SEF.
Had my appointment in the Lisbon SEF office today (yes, I know the wait time for the cards is long there, but that was the appointment I could get). It took about an hour all in, though my part was just about 10-15 minutes. The representative from my lawyerās office was great, and the SEF official was very nice as well. The computer system was just S-L-O-O-O-W in terms of getting everything uploaded.
I was able to have a nice afternoon in Sintra, and then Iām heading back to the US tomorrow. I love Portugal, and I would love to stay longer, but this is not a great time for work.
Me too. very frustrated after waiting for so long.
What happens to those who missed the appointment?
Hello,
Could you please post here the list of the documents with the validity periods?
Cheers!
Hi Inna, the validity periods were posted many times on this forum.
Just to summarize:
Other documents have no validity term requirements.
In Portugal validity of abirth certificate is 12 months. Yeah even i canāt figure out why. But actually the lawyer tells you that with astraight face 
Does anyone know of any new windows that have opened up for biometrics? Ć know these last one was Dec 16-26
That means you need to present a birth certificate re-issued within the last 12 months.
(birth certificate is only required to prove your dependantsā status as a relation to the main GV applicant)
Reissue of a birth certificate sounds strange to those who are used to having a single birth certificate issued only once, at birth. In some countries (eg France), the birth certificate is an amendable document that is issued at birth but updated throughout the personās life to record changes to the personās civil status. Even if the certificate is merely a record of the birth there can be a long version with more detail, and a re-issue can be requested from the official records office and apostilled or translated.
@raivikas and @tommigun:
Thank you very for your reply. Does this mean that the ones we have in the past will not be accepted for the nationality application. I can understand about the updated marriage certificate as the relation can be changed with time but parents cannot be changed even if the birth certificate is of many years old, parents remain the same!!!
In the case of my son (UK citizen), we asked the General Records Office to issue a certified copy of his birth certificate. That copy is dated 2023, and itās the copy that is then apostilled. Other countries may have a similar process.
I think we all appreciate the logic that the facts of birth cannot be changed with time, but I can only assume that the PT authorities do not want to ātrustā the old documents.
In fact when I came to apostille my own birth certificate in my country of birth I was told it was ātoo oldā and could not be apostilled. So they had to re-issue a fresh copy anyway in a ānewā format that then was happily apostilled.
Also you will find that more often than not the new re-issues of the certificates are now supplied with a āverifiableā QR-codes, same with the apostilles, I have just received the ones with a QR-code on my latest round.
I therefore assume that the PT authorities like things being fresh, hence the āfunnyā requirement of a 12-month validity.
Assuming the facts of birth change is probably not a wise assumption. The fact of birth itself may not change, but what is known about the event may.
In the US, now, some states allow changing of gender. Maybe thatās not a name, but itās a change. Or what if thereās geneaological issue and a DNA test proves āthat isnāt my father!ā Now might not know who the father is, just that you know now who it isnāt, and there can be legal or civil reasons such that you want that changed on the document. Adoption where itās been hidden, suddenly known later? Thatās three off the top of my head.
There are some very funny articles in tech land about all of the assumptions people make about names (and how they cause code to blow up, or make it impossible for someone to input their name). It isnāt too wise to make too many assumptions when it comes to people.
To get back on track here, is there a good list of docs required for US investors at the biometrics appointment? Thereās a thread that talked about some and how to get apostilles, but not the actual docs required.
We were told to bring fresh apostilled FBI reports and a fresh apostilled marriage certificate. They may have required other docs but those would have been in our files already. At the SEF appointment, we also had to sign a doc about pics and fingerprints and one other one that I think was the Portuguese background check.
Following up on Tommyās message above, if your biometrics appointment occurs longer than the validity of any of this documents that were previously submitted, you should bring more recent ones such that they will be within the time frame Tommy notes above. Please also note that it is the date of the document, not the date of the apostille that is important.
The guidance on the full list of documents required for biometrics has been posted on this forum before in great detail, I trust one may employ the search function yielding much success.
However, to summarize, there are three main sources of the official requirements for such list:
If you compile and de-dupe the list of documents applicable to your own case from these sources, you cannot go too much wrong.
Obviously the resulting list would vary from case to case base on the number of applicants, relations between the main applicant and their dependants etc.
And no, it does not matter if you are a āUS investorā or not, the sources stay the same.
Hope this helps.