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ResourcesFamily LawMarriage RegistrationAppointment Issues for Marriage Affidavits at the US Embassy Bangkok

Appointment Issues for Marriage Affidavits at the US Embassy Bangkok

Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing appointments at American Citizen Services at the US Embassy here in Bangkok, Thailand in reference to the Affidavit to be able to marry here in Thailand. It is often called an Affidavit of Single Status or an Affidavit of Ability to Marry in Thailand. For those who are unaware of what this document is, in order to register a marriage here in the Kingdom one has to actually prove that they are single. So in order to get married in Thailand the foreign national, if it is an American marrying a Thai National, the foreign national needs to prove that they can in fact get married in Thailand; they are in fact single. In order to do that, they need to get a document from the US Embassy

The American Citizen Services section of the United States Embassy is generally happy to provide the services associated with such a document and that facility does make appointments to go in and have the documentation signed and certified for use here in Thailand. Now in recent weeks, I should say maybe more recent months, but it has come to my attention more in the forefront of my mind in recent weeks, that the US Embassy seems to have less appointments available for doing this type of notarial work. In the past and we have made many videos on this channel on this topic, there was an Income Affidavit associated with a Retirement Visa here in Thailand and the US Embassy would process these documents. I personally probably go down to ACS once every few weeks I would say or at least I am down the Embassy compound that often I think. The ACS used to do a lot more notary work is the point I am trying to make and they were doing a lot more notary work in the context of Income Affidavits for both the Thai O Marriage Visa as well as Thai Retirement Visas. I think that they had more slots available for lack of a better term because there was more overall demand for this type of service. Now, where the income affidavit no longer exists and we have gone into great detail about why that occurred and what happened in the aftermath of that, but for purposes of this video, they no longer have that service available and for that reason I think the Embassy is trying to figure out exactly how many slots per day they need to allocate to deal with the remainder of services including Marriage Affidavits, Certified Single Status affidavits that they deal with down there. They are trying to come up with a good equilibrium for lack of a better term. They are trying to trying to come up with the right sweet spot for how many slots they need to have available for Americans to utilize in order to get their Affidavit in order to go ahead and get married here in Thailand and there are just simply fewer slots than they were at the time when they had Income Affidavits to deal with for Retirement and Marriage Visas. 

So I think probably yes you are going to have to schedule further in advance to go ahead and get one of these Affidavits certified for use here in Thailand to get married to a Thai National. It probably will result in the overall time frame for getting a marriage registered in Thailand to increase and as a practical matter I don't think this is probably going to go away because I just can't see them radically increasing the number of slots that they have back to the numbers they used under the old system when they were dealing with Income Affidavits.  I don't see them radically adding on numbers of appointment times and so I think that this is just going to be what we have to deal with in the future. Where once it was possible to get a marriage registered in a couple of weeks, I think probably a month now is what you are looking at to get that done.