Ethiopia Police Check

[AJ3000]

Hello,

My common-law wife and I lived in Ethiopia doing charity work. She lived there for 7 months and I lived there for one year. I am a Canadian citizen

Of course, because she was there for 7 months, she needs a police check as part of the process of me sponsoring her to Canada.

We do not live in Ethiopia and have no plans to return. We currently live in Vietnam (she is USA citizen), working as teachers. We can pretty much sort out everything for Vietnam quite easily, but we are concerned about getting a police check from Ethiopia, considering the 3 month timeframe they give.

I really would like to avoid getting a police check from Ethiopia as I know their bureaucracy is painfully slow and disorganized and my wife was there for 7 months (if we only knew!) doing charity work 4 years ago and won't be going back.

Questions.

1) Has anyone been able to receive a police check from Ethiopia from overseas? timelines
2) Has anyone been able to have the police check deferred and have an exception made - perhaps through a letter of explanation?
3) What is the general opinion on the chances of receiving an exception?


Thanks for your answers.

 

[scylla]

My husband's PR was approved with a missing police certificate. However in our case it was impossible to obtain the missing police certificate - not just difficult. It was for a place where he lived a year and a half close to two decades ago.

We included a letter explaining what lengths we had gone to in order to obtain the missing police certificate (we worked on it for many months) and the responses we received. We included evidence of email correspondence with several embassies / consulates who all told us what we were trying to obtain could not be obtained. We also included print-outs from a US government web site that said these PCs were impossible to obtain.

Your situation is a bit different than ours so I honestly don't know what the chances are of an exception being granted.

 

[Dimshin]

I'm Canadian of Ethiopian origin and when you say " I know their bureaucracy is painfully slow and disorganized" I know very much what you mean.....to get a simple stump on your documents my take days if not weeks and they always tell you to come back tomorrow while they can do the job in 15 min.
Any way your best bet ,I guess, will be to contact the Ethiopian embassy in Vietnam and get statement saying you tried to get the PC through them...... and don't even think that if they may pull your info form a computer system or some thing digital as Ethiopia doesn't use (or trust) computers; they keep files in old-fashioned hard-copy and put them in a shelf, and you are lucky if rats don't eat your file, if you had any.

Best luck.

 

[AJ3000]

Thanks

That's the root of the issue. The Ethiopian authority would only have a record of her arriving and departing - if that. There are no housing leases, legal agreements, or tax systems for which she took part.

We are emailing the Ethiopian consulate in China for more information.

Any more suggestions or opinions on Ethiopian police checks and/or letters of exemption are greatly appreciated.