The Hague Convention Abolishing the Requirement of Legalisation for Foreign Public Documents, the Apostille Convention, or the Apostille Treaty is an international treaty drafted by the Hague Conference on Private International Law. It specifies the modalities through which a document issued in one of the signatory countries can be certified for legal purposes in all the other signatory states. Such a certification is called an apostille (from Latin post illa and then French: a marginal note). It is an international certification comparable to a notarisation in domestic law, and normally supplements a local notarisation of the document...(wikipedia)