Legalization

In international law, legalization is the process of authenticating or certifying a legal document so a foreign country's legal system will recognize it as with full legal effect.

Authentication by legalization is widely used in international commerce and civil law matters in those jurisdictions where the simpler apostille system has not been adopted (e.g.: Canada, China). The procedure of legalization (also known as attestation or authentication, though these are essentially the same process) can be simply split into three stages, though each stage can vary in the number of steps required:

• Verification by the government of the issuing country
• Verification by the Embassy of the destination country within the issuing country
• A final verification of all steps within the destination country itself

Broadly speaking, the aim of any international document authentication process is to solve a fundamentally practical problem: how can civil and judicial officials reliably verify the authenticity of a document that was issued abroad?

Legalization attempts to solve this dilemma by creating a chain of authentications, each by a progressively higher government authority so as to ultimately narrow the point of contact between countries to a single designated official (usually in the national department responsible for foreign affairs). Therefore, by authenticating the signature and seal of this final official a foreign jurisdiction can authenticate the entire chain of verifications back to the entity responsible for issuing the original document without scrutinizing each "link" individually.

Source: Wikipedia