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