If you’ve read the first part of this two-part series on Recognition of Foreign Divorce, you’ll have understood: 

• The situations that are eligible for Recognition of Foreign Divorce
• The timeline involved
• Where you should file
• The proof you have to submit

I’ll continue below by adding three major points. 

Can I just register my foreign divorce at a Philippine embassy? 

This is not possible. You cannot just divorce abroad and register that divorce at the Philippine embassy to give it effect in the Philippines. Recognition requires a court case. A divorced Filipino spouse must obtain this judicial recognition of the foreign divorce in order to remarry.

This requirement can follow a Filipino wherever he or she goes. For example, a Filipino who would marry abroad usually has to present the government of that country with a “Certificate of Legal Capacity to Contract Marriage” from the Philippine embassy there.

Some Philippine embassies used to issue these certificates to Filipinos who had divorced foreigners even before they obtained judicial recognition of their divorce. This allowed them to marry abroad. It was for this reason that, for a while, divorced Filipinos in Japan could effectively remarry there even without going through recognition of divorce in the Philippines.

This is no longer so. 

After a line of Supreme Court decisions on the need for recognition, the Department of Foreign Affairs now requires proof that the foreign divorce was recognized by a Philippine court before a certificate of legal capacity to contract marriage is issued to a divorced Filipino. 

Similarly, in a 2010 decision, the Supreme Court told local civil registrars to stop registering foreign divorce decrees which lacked recognition from a Philippine court.

In Corpus vs. Tirol, the Court ruled that the Pasig City Civil Registry Office acted totally out of turn and without authority when it annotated a Philippine marriage certificate to reflect a Canadian divorce without a court order here. This means that if you want to register your foreign divorce in the Philippine civil registry to change your marital status, you need a lawyer to file a case. 

There have been proposals to turn the recognition process from a court process into administrative one, but these have not prospered. It requires an amendment to the law, specifically the Civil Code, and any bill touching on divorce remains controversial here. 

One version of the bill is also problematic in that it proposes to turn over responsibility for determining the authenticity of the foreign documents – the divorce decree and the foreign law – to the local civil registrars. This is troublesome considering how arcane the exercise of proving a foreign law can be. Taking that responsibility from a Regional Trial Court and placing it on a local civil registrar’s office seems inappropriate.

How can I tell who a real lawyer is? 

It was odd, but it happened too often that some people would entrust their case to someone else who was supposed to transact with an unseen lawyer on their behalf. That middleman would supposedly negotiate on their behalf, give the documents to the alleged lawyer, and then take care of minding the case for them. 

Such an arrangement is very irregular.  It should have been a warning to them that some fraud was afoot. 

Real lawyers actually interact with their clients. It doesn’t matter if they are overseas. I’ve watched my boss email, call, or text the client directly, because he might need to confirm this or that. He does this to check that they have the facts straight and make sure that he is working with a real client. He might first be contacted by a friend or a relative, but he does at least touch base with his clients to verify certain things.

Communication with your lawyer is also needed since the applicant for recognition actually has to personally sign certain documents for submission to the court. If she is abroad, she may have to do this at the Philippine consulate and send these notarized documents to her lawyer’s office in the Philippines. You should expect your lawyer to coordinate with you on these, too. 

In one of the strangest cases turned over to the law firm, a lady had completely entrusted her case to someone else. And that someone else had given it to someone else, and at the end of the day, nothing had happened to her case. 

Expect your lawyer to touch base with you. And if you have doubts about whether your lawyer is a “real” lawyer, you can certainly check his roll number at the Supreme Court and whether he is a member in good standing of the Integrated Bar of the Philippines. 

Why do I have to notify my former spouse? 

About 75% percent of the work that I do as a paralegal is not seen by the client. This type of work is low key, but it is essential to the success of a case and ensures that a favorable court decision won’t be subject to challenge.

For example, I’ll compile a client’s case folder and list of documents. I’ll work on the publication requirement. I’ll make sure that we’ve ensured all parties are sent court notices – and this includes the client’s former spouse – because the Rules of Court require it. 

Because a marriage may have ended bitterly, it is understandable if a client doesn’t want the ex-husband/ex-wife notified of the recognition case, but it has to be done. This is a case involving the marital status of the parties. The Supreme Court has called such cases actions in rem or quasi in rem. Although the purpose of sending notice is not to give the trial court jurisdiction over the person of the ex-spouse, notice should still be sent to fulfill due process.

So, there may be a period between filing the case and the first court hearing where the client might not hear much from his lawyer. But let me tell you – your lawyer is probably really, really busy working your case in that time. 

He checks with the court to see if the case has been assigned to a branch and calendared. It is not unusual to spend a few weeks trying to get this information from the courts. He’s also checking to make sure your notice of the case is duly published once weekly for three weeks in a newspaper of general circulation. This requirement alone takes up at least a month. For this, he has to again coordinate with the courts to see if it has been raffled to an accredited newspaper. He is also checking to see which other parties should be notified (it depends on the actual situation) and then making sure he can prove that they’ve been sent notice. 

All this takes considerable work. The work is necessary for the case to proceed smoothly, so the Office of the Solicitor General doesn’t object at the end of the case and say that there was a problem with due process. 

In summary

People go through Recognition of Foreign Divorce to remarry, immigrate, clarify property relations, and to revert to their maiden name on their passport. 

Expect the following when you start this process: 

• Recognition of Foreign Divorce is a court case
• You should talk directly to your lawyer
• You’ll need to file at a specific court determined by the Rules of Court
• There is a timeline of at least a year from filing to decision and there isn’t an “expedite” option from a fixer or a scammer
• Notice needs to be sent to interested parties (including your former spouse)
• The divorce decree and the foreign law need to be proved as per the Rules of Court or jurisprudence and they cannot be just a photocopy

So, talk to whomever you engage for this case. Engage a lawyer whom you feel you can work with and who has sufficient experience.  

This is a court case and so it cannot be “expedited,” nor should you expect that you can get someone from inside the PSA to magically make your record disappear. It’s important not to fall for a con. Watch out for the hallmarks of a con – fast, hands-off, hassle free processing – because if it is too good to be true, it usually is. – Rappler.com

Francesco C. Britanico is a family and corporate lawyer. He has taught Property Law and other subjects at the Legal Studies program of the Lyceum of the Philippines University. He is the managing lawyer and founder of FCB Law.