VZCZCXYZ0005
RR RUEHWEB

DE RUEHTI #0370/01 1301430
ZNR UUUUU ZZH
R 091430Z MAY 08
FM AMEMBASSY TIRANA
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC 7075
RUEAHLC/HOMELAND SECURITY CENTER WASHINGTON DC

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