FRAUD IN DOCUMENTS FROM ALBANIAN CIVIL REGISTRIES

UNCLAS TIRANA 000370

SIPDIS

DEPARTMENT FOR CA/FPP AND DRL/CRA
DHS FOR ASYLUM OFFICE

E.O. 12958: N/A
TAGS: CVIS PREF PHUM KFRD AL
SUBJECT: FRAUD IN DOCUMENTS FROM ALBANIAN CIVIL REGISTRIES


1. SUMMARY. Post has witnessed a high incidence of civil documents
issued by Albanian civil registries containing fraudulent vital
information. In some of these cases the blame rests with the
Albanian court system which is often too willing to issue a decision
changing vital information without any objective legal basis. In
others, the civil registrars have changed data without adequate
explanation. In some instances the documents are proven forgeries.
Recent investigations therefore demonstrate that information
contained in any document issued by an Albanian civil registry is
not highly reliable. END SUMMARY.


2. All Albanian vital records including, birth, marriage, death and
family records are kept by the local civil registries. A registrar
records the information by hand into a large book. Each Albanian
family has its own page or a section of a page where all the births
and marriages of children are recorded. Once an event has been
recorded, a family member may request a certificate, an abstract of
the civil registry, containing the information. A civil registry
employee will copy the requested information onto a standard blank
form which bears a serial number. The certificates are generally
prepared by hand and each certificate bears the date of preparation.
These certificates can be used as proof of identity, and are the
only document required for passport issuance.


3. A family's records are kept in the local civil registry where
the family resides. There is no national database. If a family
relocates into another district, they must request that their
records be transferred and the information will be copied into a
book in the district of the new place of residence. However, the
original district would always contain the original information as
recorded in its archives.

CREATING A NEW IDENTITY


4. Certificates obtaining fraudulent data can be used to obtain a
new identity. During the past year, biometric checks employed in
visa interviews have caught at least three individuals who have
applied for visas using wholly fraudulent identities in Albanian
passports. Post has also witnessed other cases in which vital
details such as name or date of birth have been changed in a
passport.


5. In one recent follow-to-join asylum case, Post found that an
Albanian citizen born in the 1960s in Albania was able legally to
change the location of his birth to Kosovo. The petitioner, posing
as a Kosovar for asylum, had filed fraudulent birth and marriage
certificates for her spouse listing the husband's place of birth and
their place of marriage as Kosovo. Although the beneficiary had
previously applied ten times for a tourist visa as an Albanian
citizen born in Albania, he appeared at his Visas 92 interview with
a newly-issued Albanian passport stating that he had been born in
Kosovo. A visit to the appropriate civil registries showed that
both the petitioner and beneficiary had been born and married in
Albania and it was further confirmed in Kosovo that all the
documents presented to DHS were fraudulent. One year prior to his
Visas 92 interview, the beneficiary received a court decree from the
local district court in Albania to change his place of birth to
Kosovo. The court proceedings included no witness from the civil
registry, but the court allowed the change based on the fact that
the beneficiary brought several friends with him who all attested to
the fact that he had actually been born in Kosovo and his mother
misrepresented his place of birth when it was originally recorded.
The court merely chose to ignore the reality of Albania in the 1960s
and the decision provided no explanation how the beneficiary's
mother could have, immediately after giving birth, crossed the
Albanian Alps on foot in an area heavily surveilled by both the
Yugoslav and Albanian militaries. But once the beneficiary had
obtained this change in the civil registry, he was immediately able
to obtain a new Albanian passport and a birth certificate reflecting
the change.

CHANGING VITAL INFORMATION TO QUALIFY UNDER A PETITION CLASS


6. Post has seen several instances of beneficiaries changing their
date of birth to avoid aging out of an immigrant visa category or
disguising their marital status to qualify as a derivative. Often
these cases involve forged or altered documents. For example, Post
has witnessed two cases this year in which a civil registrar issued
a certificate reflecting the beneficiary's status as unmarried when,
in fact, they were married and ineligible for their visa class. The
civil registrars were complicit in the fraud in both of the cases.


7. In another Visas 92 case, post found that the petitioner had
presented a fraudulent marriage certificate to DHS with an I-730
petition to show that the marriage had taken place before the
beneficiary had been granted asylum. Post had doubts about the date
of marriage due to the young age of the beneficiary. An inspection
of the civil registrar's records showed that the marriage had
occurred two years later than the date stated on the marriage
certificate presented to DHS. The petitioner had his attorneys in
the United States and in Albania obtain an Albanian court decree
stating that the date of marriage was a mistake and had really taken
place two years earlier. The court decree gave no explanation for
how all the parties signed the mistaken volume of the civil registry
that would not have been in existence at the time of the alleged
earlier marriage. But the local civil registry then refused to
accept the court decree because of another Albanian law which states
that a valid marriage requires the accurate recording of the date of
marriage, so no correction is possible. When the local civil
registrar wouldn't issue the petitioner a new marriage certificate,
he apparently falsified a certificate and had his attorney in the
United States submit the fraudulent certificate and the court decree
ordering the change as evidence that he had been married two years
earlier.


8. Post has also seen several cases of marriage in which at least
one of the parties to the marriage was not physically present at the
required civil registration of the marriage. Albanian law does not
recognize marriage by proxy, and therefore both parties must be
physically present before the civil registrar to have a valid
marriage. In at least two investigated cases this year, the
signatures in the marriage registry clearly do not match the
signature of one of the parties to the marriage. Those individuals
were then unable to establish their physical presence in the country
on the date of the marriage. Unfortunately, Post has been unable to
verify if the civil registrars were complicit in the fraud or if one
of the parties present on the day of the marriage was an imposter
used to obtain a marriage certificate.

MODIFYING VITAL INFORMATION TO ACCOMPLISH FRAUD OUTSIDE OF
IMMIGRATION


9. Post has witnessed multiple cases in which an individual has
drastically modified his or her date of birth for other fraudulent
reasons. In many cases, Albanian citizens obtain court decisions to
make themselves younger so that they can continue working in jobs
that have mandatory retirement ages. Post has also seen numerous
cases where the correct date of birth is no longer known because
parents during the communist period made their children appear
younger in the civil registries for male children to avoid mandatory
military service. These cases are regularly encountered during
non-immigrant visa interviews. The ease of altering dates of birth
and regularity with which it has happened have made verifying
beneficiaries' identities and relationships particularly
challenging.


10. Additionally, Post has witnessed cases where Albanians escaped
the country during Communism without any documents so they were free
to create a new date of birth upon their arrival in the United
States. In almost all of these cases involving fraudulent dates of
birth, the individual has obtained a later court decision to
validate the change by using nothing more than witness testimony as
proof that the date of birth in the civil registry was not validly
recorded.


11. Social Security benefits are the most obvious example of the
benefits that could have been gained by this fraud. Post recently
encountered an American citizen who had made himself seven years
older when he arrived in the United States seeking asylum in the
1960s. DHS had approved the F4 petition filed for the citizen's
younger brother even though the petitioner failed to submit a birth
certificate with the original petition. Rather, the petitioner had
submitted a fraudulent marriage certificate to establish same
parentage with his brother. When Post visited the civil registry
that contained the family's birth records, the true date of birth
was revealed. To further complicate matters, the local civil
registrar admitted that he had recently issued new certificates
containing the false date of birth to the American citizen
petitioner to match the clearly incorrect date in the petitioner's
U.S. passport. The civil registrar stated that he trusted the date
of birth in the U.S. passport even though it contained a fictitious
birth date. This example demonstrates that civil registrars can
easily be persuaded to modify vital data if presented with any
evidence to the contrary and are often quite gullible.


12. In all of these cases involving fraudulent vital information,
Post has found that the most reliable source is the actual registry
book itself where the original information was recorded. Civil
registrars do not generally make a physical change to the original
information in the register book, but make a notation if a later
change occurs. As certificates only reflect the most recent status
of the data, and they do not reflect the original information, it is
only possible to see the later changes if the civil registrar grants
access to the original record. Unfortunately, given Albania's poor
roads and infrastructure, it is not feasible in most cases to
actually visit the local civil registrar and examine the original
entry and compare signatures. Post also has constraints with
personnel and travel expenses.


13. In many of the recent cases involving fraud, the blame does not
rest solely with the civil registrar's office. In many cases
involving suspected fraud, a court decision attempted to modify the
information. Until courts cease the practice of allowing
individuals to change radically their vital data without adequate
objective proof, the integrity of the certificates issued by civil
registrars will remain questionable even in the absence of other
types of fraud. Additionally, the ease with which the certificates
have been forged is another cause for concern.


14. Post wishes to call attention to the high rate of fraud in
documents issued by civil registries and cautions against placing
excessive faith in these documents' reliability.


WITHERS