Registration of birth in the Population Register System

Births of Finnish citizens outside Finland must be notified to the Digital and Population Data Agency(Link to another website.) (Opens New Window). You can also submit the notification at a Finnish embassy or send it there to be posted to the Local Register Office for registration.

Birth certificates issued by an EU country are accepted without requiring that a so-called apostille(Link to another website.) (Opens New Window) be attached to the document.

In other countries the original birth certificate or a copy of it, authenticated at a mission of Finland, must be appended to the notification. The document must be legalised(Link to another website.) (Opens New Window) and, if it has been issued in some other language than Finnish, Swedish or English, an authorised translation in one of these languages must be provided. Translations made abroad must be legalised. Translations made by an authorised translator in Finland are valid as such.

An Apostille stamp is not required for a birth certificate, which is issued by an EU country authority and a translation of the certificate is not needed if a multilingual standard form is appended to the document.

Registration of a child born in Japan

Send the following documents with the notification (Notification of a Finnish citizen born outside of Finland):

  • copy of the mother's passport
  • copy of the father's passport
  • copy of the mother's, father's, and child's Japanese residence card (if applicable)
  • from the ward office, a koseki tohon (if one of the parents is Japanese) or  a juri shomeisho (if both parents are non-Japanese). These documents needs to be legalized with an apostille​​ .
  • translation of the koseki tohon or juri shomeisho in Finnish, Swedish or English; also the translation must be legalized with an apostille ​​​

Send the documents to the Digital and Population Data Services Agency.

You can also send the above documents to the Embassy, from where they will be forwarded to the Digital and Population Data Services Agency. For this service we charge a service fee. Please contact the Embassy before sending the documents to us.