Buying property from abroad by power of attorney: what the document must say

If you cannot be in the country, someone has to act for you, and the instrument that gives them that authority is a power of attorney — a wakala. It is a short document, and it is the most common point of failure in a purchase made from abroad. Nobody reads one closely when it is drawn, because at that stage it feels like a formality. Its defects surface later, at a counter, with everyone assembled and one step that cannot now be taken. Correcting it from Santiago or Detroit takes weeks.

It authorises a named person to do specified things on your behalf. Within the scope you granted, their signature binds you as though it were yours. Outside it they have no authority at all, and an act taken outside it is not your act.

Two things follow. A power of attorney is not a general handover of your affairs; it is an instrument of defined scope, and the scope is whatever the document says. And the drafting is not a formality — it is the thing itself. A power that does not mention a step your representative needs to take does not permit that step.

Under the law in force in the West Bank this has teeth. A general authority confers only powers of administration: managing, collecting, maintaining. Acts of disposition — and buying or selling immovable property is the clearest example — require a special authority that names the act. A relative holding your general power of attorney may find that it does not authorise the one thing you sent it for.

Too narrow is the common one. The document authorises signing the sale contract but says nothing about appearing at the land registry to register the transfer, so the contract is signed and the property is never put in your name. Or it authorises the purchase but not payment of the fees due before registration will proceed. Or it names one office and not the other. Each of these does most of the job and then stops, and the stopping point is discovered at the counter, by someone who cannot fix it.

Too broad is rarer and worse. A general authority over your property and your money hands real power to another person, usually a relative, in a transaction involving a large sum, at a distance where you cannot supervise. Most of the time nothing goes wrong, because most people are honest. But a wide authority also outlives your intentions: it can be used for a different property, or after you have changed your mind, or by someone you have since fallen out with. Where trust is complete, an unnecessarily wide instrument is still bad practice, in the way that leaving a signed blank cheque with a friend is bad practice.

The document you want is specific to this transaction and complete for it. Those are not competing instructions. They are the same instruction, applied to the real list of steps.

• The principal and the attorney, each identified by document. Full name as it appears on the identity document being relied on, its type and number, and the issuing state. A power executed on a Chilean passport, presented beside a Palestinian identity card carrying a different transliteration of the same name, will be questioned — and the place it will be questioned is the counter.
• The property, identified unambiguously. Where the parcel is registered, that means its registration particulars rather than a description. Where you are buying and no parcel has been chosen yet, the authority has to be framed by reference to the purchase rather than the plot — worth raising with your lawyer, because a power naming no property and a power naming the wrong property fail in the same place.
• The powers granted, concretely. For a purchase the list is longer than most people expect: signing the sale contract; paying the price and giving valid receipt; appearing before the notary and before the land registry; signing the registration instruments and the declarations they require; obtaining official documents, extracts and certificates; and paying the taxes and fees the transfer attracts. A power naming the first and the last of these and nothing in between will stop somewhere in the middle.
• Whether your attorney may delegate. Substitution — the power to appoint someone else to act in their place — is not implied. If it is not granted it does not exist, which is usually what you want. Where you do grant it, grant it narrowly.
• Duration and expiry. Under Law No. 51 of 1958, still in force in the West Bank, a power to sell or transfer immovable property must be acted on at the land registry within one year of the date it was drawn or certified — not counting time lost to delay inside the registry itself — and it lapses if it is not. That rule bites on the selling side, which matters to you twice: once if you are ever the seller, and once now, because the seller you are buying from may also be abroad and acting through an attorney whose document is older than it looks. The age of that power is worth checking. On the buying side no equivalent statutory limit applies, so the expiry date is yours to choose. Choose one.
• Revocation. Say how the authority may be revoked and to whom notice must go. This is drafting rather than a legal requirement, and it is the difference between revoking cleanly and arguing about it afterwards.

Identifying the parties, a special authority naming the act, and Arabic text are requirements. An expiry date, a narrow substitution clause and a list of powers built from the real transaction are prudence. Both matter; only one of them stops the transaction at the counter.

A power of attorney signed at your kitchen table has no standing. What gives it standing is the chain of authentication behind the signature, and there are two routes.

The first is to execute it at a Palestinian diplomatic or consular mission. You attend in person with your identity document and a copy of your attorney's, the mission draws the power in Arabic and witnesses your signature, and the document leaves that meeting already official. Nothing further is needed in the country where you signed. For the irrevocable form used in property sales, the mission will also want identity documents for two witnesses.

The second is a local notary followed by legalisation. You sign before a notary where you live; the notary's signature is then certified by your country's authentication authority — in most states the ministry of foreign affairs, in the United States the Department of State, in the United Kingdom the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office — and the result is legalised by the Palestinian mission accredited to that country. Legalisation means only that each authority in the chain vouches for the signature and seal of the one below it. None of them is confirming that the document says the right thing. That part is yours, and it is the part that goes wrong.

Both routes end the same way. A power arriving from abroad is authenticated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates in Ramallah before it is used, and the land registry expects to see that stamp.

An apostille is a single certificate that replaces the whole legalisation chain between two states that are both party to the 1961 Hague Convention. It is quick and cheap, and it is why most documents now move between countries without ever seeing a consulate.

It does not apply here. Palestine is not a contracting party to the convention, and an apostille has effect only between two states that both are. This catches people constantly, because the countries the diaspora lives in are almost all parties — Chile, the United States, the United Kingdom, every EU state, and among the Gulf states Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman — so a notary in any of them will offer you an apostille as the obvious answer. Take it if you want a document that works in Madrid. For Ramallah it buys nothing, and the full consular chain still applies. The same is true in the other direction: a document issued in Palestine cannot be apostilled for use abroad and needs consular legalisation instead.

States accede to the convention regularly and this could change. Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Kuwait are among those still outside it. Ask at the time rather than assuming.

• The Embassy of the State of Palestine in Santiago is the practical route for most of the community, and executing the power there in one appointment avoids the legalisation chain entirely.
• Through a Chilean notary instead, the sequence is notary, then the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, then the embassy. An apostille is not a substitute for the last step.
• Distance is the real constraint. If you are not in or near Santiago, ask the embassy what it will accept by post before you spend a day travelling.

• No Palestinian office has operated in Washington since 2018. Consular work for people in the United States runs through Palestine's mission to the United Nations in New York.
• The full chain applies: a notary public, then county and state certification where your state requires it, then authentication by the Department of State, then the mission. Each hop is a courier leg with its own turnaround.
• This is the slowest of the common routes and the one most worth starting early. Begin it when you decide to buy, not when a contract is ready to sign.

• The easiest of them. The Embassy of the State of Palestine in Amman draws and authenticates powers of attorney directly, including the irrevocable form used in property sales, and the fees are modest.
• Drawn before a Jordanian notary instead, the document goes to the Jordanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and then to the embassy.
• For a family spread between Amman and the West Bank, this is often the fastest way to get several relatives' powers executed at once — which matters where a parcel is held in undivided shares and every co-owner has to act.

• Palestine maintains missions across the Gulf, and executing the power at the mission is the shortest path in all of them.
• Where you use a local notary instead, the chain runs through the host state's ministry of foreign affairs to the Palestinian mission. Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman issue apostilles; that does not change what is needed here.
• If your passport is held by an employer or a sponsor, allow time to retrieve it. The mission will want to see the original identity document.

• Notary, then the national legalisation authority, then the Palestinian embassy or mission.
• Missions do not sit in every capital and several are accredited to more than one country, so establish which mission covers your country of residence before you book anything.
• The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates publishes the current list of missions. Work from that list rather than from a search result, because contact details and jurisdictions change.

• Take the document as far as the local chain allows — notary, then your country's authentication authority — and send it to the mission accredited to your country, having asked first whether it accepts submissions by courier.
• Where that fails, the two workable alternatives are executing the power on a trip to Jordan, which most of the diaspora can enter and which has a functioning mission, or executing it in Palestine while you are there for a viewing.
• Signing before a foreign notary and hoping it will pass is not one of the options. It is refused at the registry, and you find that out at the counter.

Documents used before a Palestinian notary or the land registry are in Arabic. A power executed at a mission is drawn in Arabic from the start, which is part of why that route is simpler. One executed before a foreign notary in English, Spanish or German needs a certified Arabic translation, and that is better done in Palestine than abroad — a translator in Ramallah knows the terms the registry expects, and a loose rendering of a technical term is a document that comes back. Have the translation done after the legalisation is finished, so that the stamps are covered as well as the text.

On timing: a mission appointment is one visit plus whatever the queue is, which is days in Amman and sometimes weeks elsewhere. The legalisation route is longer — the notary same-day, the national authority anywhere from same-day to a fortnight, a courier leg between each stage, then the mission, then the translation and the Ramallah authentication at the far end. Two to six weeks from decision to usable document is a fair planning assumption for most countries, with the United States at the long end. If something in the wording has to be corrected you are starting again, which is the practical argument for having it checked before you sign rather than after.

This is a question of judgment rather than law, and it deserves saying plainly. You are authorising another person to bind you in a transaction involving a large sum, in a country you are not in, with limited ability to see what is happening.

What matters, in order. That they are reachable: someone who does not answer the phone for a week can cost you the transaction. That they understand the transaction well enough to notice when something is off. And that they will tell you when it is. The last is the rare one, because the instinct of a relative acting for family abroad is to smooth things over and report that everything is fine, which is the kind thing to say and the wrong thing to do. You want the person who calls to say that the seller has changed his account of where the boundary runs.

Proximity to the property matters less than people assume. Someone reliable two governorates away is a better choice than someone unreliable in the village. And whoever you choose, put an expiry date on the authority: circumstances change, relationships change, and a power that lapses on a date is easier than one that has to be revoked.

Revocation is made in the same form as the grant — before a notary, or at the mission where the power was executed. The real work is in the notification. Your attorney has to be told, and so does anyone relying on the authority, which for a property transaction means the land registry and the office holding the deposited power. A revocation you have not communicated has not taken effect in fact, whatever the paper says.

Acts your attorney validly took before the revocation reached them stand. That is not a technicality; it is the rule that makes it possible to deal with an agent at all. If your attorney signed a binding contract on Tuesday and you revoked on Wednesday, you are a party to that contract.

One power of attorney cannot be revoked at all. Where an authority to sell or transfer is granted in circumstances in which a third party's right attaches to it — in the standard case a buyer who has paid the price — it holds regardless of the principal's later change of mind or death, and the registry will act on it. This instrument, the wakala dawriyya, is widely used in Palestinian property practice and it is a serious thing to sign. Do not grant one as a seller thinking it is an ordinary authority, and do not rely on one as a buyer without knowing that it too must reach the registry within a year of its date.

We do not draft powers of attorney and we do not advise on their contents. That is a lawyer's work, and a document of this consequence should be drawn by someone who is answerable for it.

What we can do is tell you what the transaction will actually require, which is a useful thing to bring to that conversation. We deal with buyers abroad constantly, and we know where in a purchase your representative has to appear, which offices are involved, what the seller's side will be signing, and where the steps that need presence cluster. A lawyer drafting a power of attorney against that list writes a better document than a lawyer drafting one against a general description of a purchase. We will also tell you when something needs you rather than your representative.

This article is general information and is not legal advice. Authentication requirements differ from country to country and change without notice, and the right power of attorney depends on the transaction in front of you. Speak to a qualified lawyer about your own situation, and check the current requirements with the mission you will be using.