The Hague Convention Abolishing the Requirement of Legalisation for Foreign Public Documents, the Apostille Convention, or the Apostille Treaty, is an international treaty drafted by the Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH). It specifies the modalities through which a document issued in one of the contracting states can be certified for legal purposes in all the other contracting states. A certification under the terms of the convention is called an apostille (from Latin post illa and then French: a marginal note) or Hague apostille. It is an international certification comparable to a notarisation in domestic law, and normally supplements a local notarisation of the document. If the convention applies between two countries, such an apostille is sufficient to certify a document's validity, and removes the need for double-certification, by the originating country and then by the receiving country.