Apostille vs. Embassy legalisation for Mauritania
Two arrangements exist. In the first, countries inside a treaty take one standard certificate from each other and ask for nothing more. In the second, the receiving country puts consular officials of its own in front of the file before it counts for anything at all. Mauritania works to the second, and an apostille for Mauritania is not part of that arrangement.
Mauritania's Hague status & what it means
Mauritania has not joined the Hague Apostille Convention. An apostille from the United Kingdom to Mauritania therefore has no standing there, and the position is a country-level one. It does not bend for a particular kind of paper, a particular employer or a particularly urgent reason. One position, applied to everything that crosses that border from here.
The document does not pick the road
It is natural to assume a degree is handled differently from a birth certificate, or that a company record has a faster channel of its own. On this corridor none of that holds. The destination's position picks the road, and it picks it once for every paper leaving Britain for that country. Sorting your pile by type is simply not the useful first move.
What the document does decide is where you begin. Plymouth Register Office at Derriford Park issues certified copies of birth, marriage and death records straight from the register, so the certificate you keep never has to travel anywhere. A university, a court or a company registry supplies its own equivalent. Those starting points differ; everything from there onwards does not.
Cost & timing for this route
The British charge is the same per document whatever the document is: £45 by post at the Legalisation Office, or £40 on the next-day route open to registered businesses. The consular charge belongs to the receiving side and is not published on this page. Because both are counted per sheet, the size of your pile sets the bill far more than its contents ever do.
Destination-specific requirements
Mauritania asks for consular legalisation, applied through its consular representation in Britain. Those officials read what is in front of them, so a clean issued version matters far more than the category a document falls into. Prepare each sheet as though it were the only one, send them together if that suits you, and expect each to be judged on its own merits.