The Commission has proposed to scrap the bureaucratic stamps that are currently issued in order for documents to be recognised in other member states of the European Union. This would mean the end of the “Apostille”, a certificate used to authenticate public documents.

The measure would not affect the validity of the content or the motives of the documents themselves; it would simply be a case of getting rid of the tags attached to documents that prove their authenticity.  The aim of this would be to save in translation costs as well as to cut bureaucracy and processing times.

Twelve categories of public documents would be affected by the proposal, including those related to name, marriage or registered partnership, birth and adoption. Also proposed are optional, multilingual forms in all official EU languages.

Source (24.04.2013):
www.europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-13-355_en.htm