Advice Needed On Thai Birth Certificate.

[menzies233]

Anyone any ideas on this? My Niece (Thai National) has just given birth to a son, the father is an Australian, they are not married. They are now having problems giving the child the Surname they want.

They want the baby to have the Australian fathers surname, however, this is proving very difficult due to the way Australia prints the names in the passport.

Most civilised countries i.e. Great Britain will print "Given Name....." "Surname" and even print it in the hated French along with the English, ( My last passport even had it in bloody Welsh!)

Well, Australia does not seem to do that, they simply state NAME - Then print the Surname first followed by the first and middle name with no translation or explanation.

The Thais will not accept this as proof of family name.

Does anyone know what would be the best steps to proceed as how to get the fathers name on the Thai Birth Certificate? They have been told that unless they complete the naming process in 15 days they will be fined!

I think that this is surely something to do with the fact that they are not married, as when me and my wife had our kid, we were unable to take him out of the hospital before we picked a name and registered the birth (14 years ago)

My niece and her boyfriend have been able to leave the hospital already without registering the baby's name.

Any advice

Cheers!

[metisdead]

Moved to the Family and children forum.

[ripstanley]

I will try and post again. The thread was moved while I was posting and lost everthing.

Do you have access to a Thai passport?

If you do then have a look at the machine readable line at the bottom of the Bio page.

If the Thai person name is surname Poy and given name Sai you will see the following

P<THAPOY<<SAI

If the Australian name is Surname Smith and Given name John Paul you will see

P<AUSSMITH<<JOHN<PAUL

This is universal for all machine readable passports and proves what the surname is.

I hope this helps.

If anymore problem have some one ring the Thai passport office and they will confirm this

Edited September 29, 2015 by ripstanley

[menzies233]

I will try and post again. The thread was moved while I was posting and lost everthing.

Do you have access to a Thai passport?

If you do then have a look at the machine readable line at the bottom of the Bio page.

If the Thai person name is surname Poy and given name Sai you will see the following

P<THAPOY<<SAI

If the Australian name is Surname Smith and Given name John Paul you will see

P<AUSSMITH<<JOHN<PAUL

This is universal for all machine readable passports and proves what the surname is.

I hope this helps.

If anymore problem have some ring the Thai passport office and they will confirm this

Thanks, I can see what you mean, most passports are the same, i.e. Thai Aus and UK, they follow that format. Problem is that the Thais here in Chiang Mai City Hall and Hospital will not recognise this, they claim they want "Proof" of the Surname! and the Aus Passport does not clearly define first and family name.

Personally, I think it is simply that they are being awkward and do not want to put the foreigners name as the Thai child's surname as the parents are not married. I had no problem registering my son 14 years ago, they translated my first. middle and family name into Thai for the documents.

Thanks for your help though.

If anyone out there in Chiang Mai has the telephone number of a company that used to be out by the US Embassy, STAR VISA, if they could message me I would be very grateful I would even drive into the city to buy you a beer one weekend!

Thanks all the same.

[dabhand]

OP, I'm not in Chiang Mai and you may already have googled for Star Visa, but this website may assist:

http://www.i-starvisa.com/contact_us.asp

Interesting topic as it brought back memories of the problem I had when my first son was born in Chula Hospital, Bangkok, back in 1991.

Despite the clear fact that the baby was born to my Thai wife, the hospital noted on the Birth Certificate that my son was 'Non-Thai'! There may have been some confusion due to his hair being extremely fair at birth but absolutely no confusion as to where he had come from!! Her details, as a Thai, were also correctly noted on the certificate.

This error was not spotted at the time - think it is noted on the top right of the certificate. Anyway, when the error was pointed out, not sure when, no replacement was allowed to be issued, instead there is a notation on the back of the certificate which makes reference to a petition 'to change nationality to Thai'. This was some three years after his birth.

I was working outside of Thailand for most of the intervening period so my wife dealt with the running around - not that I could have assisted too much anyway. To this day she refuses to talk about the matter as she was extremely upset by the degree of red tape associated with correcting an obvious error of the hospital.

Good luck with sorting out the issues connected with your niece.

[menzies233]

OP, I'm not in Chiang Mai and you may already have googled for Star Visa, but this website may assist:

http://www.i-starvisa.com/contact_us.asp

Interesting topic as it brought back memories of the problem I had when my first son was born in Chula Hospital, Bangkok, back in 1991.

Despite the clear fact that the baby was born to my Thai wife, the hospital noted on the Birth Certificate that my son was 'Non-Thai'! There may have been some confusion due to his hair being extremely fair at birth but absolutely no confusion as to where he had come from!! Her details, as a Thai, were also correctly noted on the certificate.

This error was not spotted at the time - think it is noted on the top right of the certificate. Anyway, when the error was pointed out, not sure when, no replacement was allowed to be issued, instead there is a notation on the back of the certificate which makes reference to a petition 'to change nationality to Thai'. This was some three years after his birth.

I was working outside of Thailand for most of the intervening period so my wife dealt with the running around - not that I could have assisted too much anyway. To this day she refuses to talk about the matter as she was extremely upset by the degree of red tape associated with correcting an obvious error of the hospital.

Good luck with sorting out the issues connected with your niece.

Thank you for your post, thanks for the insight and the info on Star Visa, greatly appreciated. Thank you so much!

[evadgib]

Something that worked years ago when trying to address a similar problem was to ring the Embassy, ask to speak to a Thai speaker (who had already been primed) & pass the phone to the registrar. If they're simply 'trying it on' the effect is similar to summoning a genie from Aladdin's lamp...

Out in minutes; document in hand

HTH

Edited September 30, 2015 by evadgib