Dear English Forum members, I would like to start by thanking you for the amazing engagement here. I have been a long term lurker and this is my first post here.
Context:
I am an Indian national working and living in St.Gallen. I got married last year in August and my Husband applied for a Family Reunification Visa at the Swiss Embassy in New Delhi. Within a week after that, I've received here a letter from the Migrations Amt St.Gallen that my Husband would have to reach out to the Swiss Consulate in Mumbai for a "Civil Status Verification" which would take about 3-4 months and cost 1000CHF. Our application would not be processed further until we submit them this verification report. We paid the fee and started the verification process with the Mumbai Consulate Team in September last year. In November of last year, the families of my Husband as well as mine were visited by the "Verification Expert" hired by the consulate.
The 4 month period ended by the end of January this year and we got in touch with the Mumbai consulate to know if the process is complete. Since then, i.e. end of January, all we get as reply from the Mumbai consulate is "We received your verification report, it will be processed and forwarded to Switzerland". It is now about 5.5 months since the beginning of this process and we simply don't get a timeline from them as to when we could expect the said verification report will be sent to Switzerland.
Is there something that we could do to get more information?
We are now not sure if the verification report would ever be submitted. Is there an office where we could escalate this issue to get a response?
I am in the same situation as you are. Once you are visited by the verification expert, they’ll still have to authenticate and sometimes even translate all you marriage documents in German ( as you live in St. Gallen). So it might take little bit longer. As for now, you can first send a mail to swiss consulate in Mumbai to ask for an update and at the same time you can also contact “zivilstandsamt” of your canton with your name and date of birth to ask them if they have received your file. Also contact the immigration office of your canton.
Know that once mumbai office sends the document to Switzerland it takes up to 2/3 weeks to reach your canton since mumbai will first send it to Bern and then Bern will transfer it to you canton.
I know it’s probably frustrating for you. What you can do for now is to prepare your rental agreement documents, if you are working then your pay slip etc.
I gathered from your other posts that you are a Swiss Citizen and I believe the process in our case might be slightly different to yours. For example, I am not sure if our file would be forwarded to “zivilstandsamt” as I am not a citizen. What might be the case is that the verification report will be first sent to SEM in Bern and then eventually routed to my Kantonal authorities. Concerning the other supporting documents (like payslips), the Migrationsamt St.Gallen had already asked for them in their initial mail from August'22 and I have submitted the same to them back then.
Another complication that we have at the moment is that, I've accepted a new job offer in Kanton Zurich and I will be starting there in June'23. While accepting the offer, we expected that the Family Reunification will be issued within the stated 3-4 month timeline and the change of Kantons will happen once my Husband is effectively in Switzerland. We are now wondering how the delay in the Visa timeline will effect our plans of moving to Zurich.
Yes I thought of that as well. This is why I think you should also contact the immigration office of your canton. I don’t know if you have read other posts of people who are from India as well, they give you a pretty good idea of how long it might take, usually the verification part is pretty long. But once your paper is received here, I believe it’ll be matter of couple of weeks.
Heres’a a link of somebody who went through the same process as you, but is from Pakistan. He gives a rough idea of his timeline from beginning to end.
Thank you for the link. I came across this post earlier. It looks like the standard processing time at Consulates in Pakistan is 7 Months compared to 3-4 Months in India (as specifically mentioned in the application form).
@Bowlie
I am currently living in St. Gallen and will live here until the 1st of June. When we submitted the application for the Family Reunion Visa (in Aug'22), we never intended to move to another Kanton. It was just in the last couple of weeks that the new job opportunity at Zurich materialized. From my understanding, the visa application still falls under Kanton St. Gallen as I will be a resident until June'23.
If I understood properly OP lived in St. Gall when she applied for it. And she still lives in St. Gall. She will change canton soon but haven’t changed yet. I don’t think this is what delaying anything. However if she changes canton now, it might delay the process.
Yes, we've finally received the Authorization. The Civil Status Verification process took about 5.5 months from the point of the submission of our application to the point of issuing the Authorization.