This is a description of how me (Danish citizen) and my wife (Japanese citizen) got our family reunification. I am writing this in the hopes that it can help give and overview and answer some questions for others looking to follow a similar path.
I first found my now wife on Tinder in March 2018, she was planning a year long working holiday trip to Denmark and was looking for local friends.
We hit it off and met up as soon as she arrived in Denmark August 2018, after finishing her Danish learning boarding school 4 month stay she moved in with me in December.
At this point we were had already more or less decided to get married after her working holiday to be able to stay together long term.
After the year she went back to Japan for the 3 months required for her to reenter Denmark on a tourist visa after which we would get married.
Prøvelsesattest
We applied for Prøvelsesattest (permission to get married) on January 9th 2020, 22 days before my wife reentered Denmark.
While in Japan my wife had prepared necessary documentation for both Prøvelsesattest and family reunification,
among which was the certificate of marriage status to prove that she wasn't already married this paper also needed an apostille which was a attached paper specifying the legality of the document internationally. This took quite a bit of time in Japan because of their bureaucracy and lack of digitalization.
Our application for prøvelsesattest cost 1650 DKK, we got a receipt in E-boks within a few hours, that stated that the application would take 5 days to process unless...
That's where our problems began. The reciept had stated 5 days, though:
>>>> "the application can in some cases take longer if we need to get additional information from you" <<<<
On january 10th the day after our application we get an E-boks message
"Kære [Me] Familieretshuseter i gang med at behandle jeres ansøgning om en prøvelsesat-test til brug for, at I kan blive viet. I forbindelse med behandlingen af jeres ansøgning har vi konstateret, atvi mang-ler nogle dokumenter fra den anden part. Det videre forløbFor at vi kanfærdigbehandle jeres ansøgning, har vi derfor bedt [my wife] om at sende den manglende dokumentation senestden 09-02-2020. Når vi har modtaget denne, vil vi fortsætte behandlingen af jeres ansøgning."
They needed additional information:
1. For my wife to change her address in the Danish address register to having moved out of Denmark
We had assumed that after her working holiday her cpr number would be closed, so we never thought to update the address in the Danish register, but that never happened
When we applied for Prøvelsesattest there was an optional field for entering a CPR number, since my wife had one from her working holiday we entered it.
2. Opholdstilladelse (residence permit) for entering Denmark.
We had not attached a permit in the application. The reason was, as we had specified in an "additional information" in our application, that there is no such thing for a Japanese tourist since they are completely VISA free and can enter without any permission or papers.
We changed the address and uploaded a message again explaining the VISA free system but never got any reply.
After my wife arrived in Denmark on January 31st we further uploaded a picture of her passport stamp showing that she had legally entered Denmark but never got any reply.
Then we waited...
After two weeks I wrote a message to Familieretshuset on E-boks asking whether they accepted our additional information and for a status of our application. Never got any reply.
A month after applying I called Familieretshuset and asked for a status as they had written on their contact form they could not provide any status, however they confirmed that they had our additional information in the system and that the fact that we hadn't heard back further was a sign that the information was accepted. I asked them what we should in the case that we had to wait another month and were told that we could try writing e-boks message.
Over the next two months I called familieretshuset 4 times without much luck. I managed to get them to add a note to my case that my wifes tourist stay would expire end of april.
We managed to find other stories online of processing taking months if they had to provide additional information.
On april 7th, After almost 3 months had passed we had pretty much lost hope to get a reply before having to go back to Japan since there were 23 days until my wife had to leave. We called Familieretshuset one more time, explaining that we had waited 3 months and to get married at the city hall they needed a 2 week processing time. Time was running out. Finally a lady was helpful and said that she would see if she couldn't get a caseworker to look at our case.
We received a confirmation that we had been approved within a few hours after that. A 3 month stressful wait for them to spend two hours approving our application.
We also got a confirmation from Aarhus Kommune that they received our prøvelsesattest asking us for a date we wished to get married >>>with a deadline of 3 months<<<. Meaning that if my wife had to go back to Japan it would be 3 months before she could reenter and the Prøvelsesattest would expire and we'd have to reapply.
Getting married
We had to hurry and get married before the end of april but due to corona it was not possible to get married at the city hall, or a church also because I am not a member
I had read that city counselors had the ability to wed people so I looked up the Aarhus city counsil members and wrote to one from the migrant friendly Radikale Venstre political party, though I was rejected
Not giving up hope with now fewer days to spare, I wrote to another counsil member and luckily she agreed to come to our address and Marry us, we felt a huge relief and finally had a date, April 14th
Next we needed the commune to prepare Marriage certificate and other paperwork, at first there was some confusion as the commune didn't fully grasp the urgency and that we already had a city counsil member who had agreed to come to our address, they were also working from home which made things a bit difficult, however some thorough explaining and politeness went a long way and they managed to prepare the paperwork just in time, which the city counsil member picked up a day before the wedding ceremony
Finally on April 14th at 3 in the afternoon we got married in our large common garden with the counsil member, my stepdad and sister as sole witnesses due to corona. Happy as we were, next up was the supposeduly long road of obtaining familily reunification
Family reunification
We had seen examples on this forum of applications taking more than a year so we prepared for a long wait, but it was also stressful for my wife as she would not be able to get free schooling, work or even volunteer while the application was being processed
We waisted little time and the day after the wedding ceremony we prepared the final documents and submitted our application by normal post (make sure you have a printer with a lot of paper available for this part)
We had read online that my wife could legally stay in the country after we got confirmation that the application was received, but that wouldn't come right away and we were running low on time
I had also found a few sources about staying in the country without getting that confirmation, and it seemed like it would be legal if we eventually got a confirmation, but if we did not get that confirmation, we would have retroactively broken the law and my wife could risk being banned from the country up to 10 years
We discussed whether we wanted to take that chance or whether she should go back to Japan until we had approval. We decided we would take the chance and did not book a plane ticket, partly because corona made that plan very difficult and gave us a fairly good excuse in case we got in trouble
Luckily that worrying was not necessary as we got a receipt that they received our application on April 27th over e-boks
"Vi har modtaget din ansøgning" and "Du må opholde dig i Danmark, indtil vi har vurderet din ansøgning"
Another sigh of relief, now just for the tense waiting to see if we got our approval, but we were hopeful as we seemed to be within all the requirements. I even made a phone call sometime earlier in the process asking if we would normally get approved if we fufilled all the requirements and we got a hessitant yes that all that fufilled the requirements normally got approved
In our application we had written a question whether my wife having passed Module 3 in Danish could stand in for the later requirements of passing Prøve i Dansk 1 & 2, on May 5th we got a negative answer to that question in e-boks but at least we knew they were working on our application and didn't have any other critical questions
Approval
Our worries of a long wait were not to be as on May 11th 2020 we got our approval of Family Reunification conditioned that I would post economic safety of about 100.000 DKK
Within a week we had a guarentee costing us 2% interest/year created with our bank and the bank submitted that paperwork to the commune
On may 26th we got a receipt that the commune had received our guarentee from the bank
On June 30th we got the final approval lasting 2 years and giving my wife almost all the rights of a Danish Citizen!
Of course there was the requirement of passing two Danish tests within 9 months
My wife also had to register her address in the personregister (CPR) within 5 days, she did that on July 1st
Since my wife already had a CPR number from her working holiday, she got to keep that and had to request the physical residence card that would function as proof of her legal residence. We called Udlændingestyrelsen on July 2nd ordering the residence card.
On July 14th we received the residence card:
- opholdskort2.jpg (123.15 KiB) Vist 1959 gange
My wife passed A2 test late in July (removing the need for A1, these tests are held rather infrequently so don't miss the next opportunity if you want to stay within the deadlines)
At long last we were now Married and able to stay together!
Conclusion
It's now 8 months later and we are looking for a new home getting started on our new life!
I hope this post was able to help give an overview of the process, at least with our circumstances, For any questions email me at jjonjex@gmail.com