Reviewed by Carlos Vargas, Texas Licensed Funeral Director (TFSC #119648) ·
A page for finding the embassies, with no embassies on it
This guide has less to tell you than any other on the site, and the honest thing is to show you exactly what we checked rather than pad it out.
The Somali Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation is online and answers normally. It publishes a page titled Find our Embassy Abroad. On 22 September 2026 that page carried its heading, the ministry’s own contact block and nothing else. No list, no addresses, no country index. We read it twice, once through a plain fetch and once in a browser that runs the page’s scripts, in case the list was being drawn after loading. It was not.
The contact the ministry does publish is its own, in Mogadishu: Wadajir, Maka almukarama road, with a general address of comms@mfa.gov.so and a telephone of +252 771 000 111. That is a ministry switchboard rather than a consular desk, and it is in Somalia rather than in the United States, but it is the one official channel we could verify.
What the ministry does publish, and why none of it helps
The ministry’s site is not thin. It is simply pointed elsewhere.
It publishes a Department of Diaspora Affairs, established in 2013 and organised into four sections covering migration and labour, diaspora engagement, culture and research, and diaspora direct investment. It publishes card services run by its Protocol Department, which issue diplomatic and consular identity cards to accredited diplomats, to staff of international organisations and to local personnel at missions.
Neither is a consular service for a family. The diaspora department is built around remittances, investment and knowledge transfer; the card service issues identity cards to officials. We found no page on any Somali government domain setting out what happens when a Somali national dies abroad, what a family should send, to which office, or at what cost. We are not going to reconstruct one from anywhere else.
| What was checked | What it returned |
|---|---|
| Ministry of Foreign Affairs site | Answers normally |
| Its Find our Embassy Abroad page | Heading and contact block only |
| Two plausible embassy addresses in the United States | No connection at all |
| Texas directory of consular offices | Somalia not listed |
| Apostille Convention status table | Somalia not listed |
| United States mission consular menu | No death or remains page |
The American side is quiet too
For most destinations in these guides the United States mission fills the gap. It publishes a disposition-of-remains report describing what the country requires, what the local costs are and how remains are prepared. Liberia has one. Eritrea has one. South Sudan has one. Russia has one.
The United States mission for Somalia publishes a consular services menu and we read it in full. It carries services and notarials. There is no death-of-a-citizen page and no disposition-of-remains report on it. Two plausible addresses for a Somali embassy in the United States were also tried and neither connected at all, so we cannot tell you whether the sites are down, moved or gone, and we do not guess.
That is four sources checked and four silences, and we are reporting the silence as silence. It does not mean no procedure exists. It means no procedure is published where a family can find it, which is a different thing and a more useful one to know before spending an evening searching.
The one chain that does apply
One part of this is settled, and it is the part that starts in Texas.
Somalia does not appear on the HCCH status table for the Apostille Convention. We read the table in full and searched it; Somalia is absent, while Liberia and Senegal are present, which is how we know the reading worked rather than the page failing to load. There is also no Somali consular office in Texas: the Texas Secretary of State publishes a directory of consular offices in the state and Somalia is not on it.
So a Texas death certificate takes the older route rather than the apostille one — the state that issued it, then the United States Department of State, then whichever mission the family is directed to. Texas is the first step and the only one with a published price. It issues a universal apostille certificate serving as both authentication and apostille, and charges fifteen dollars per document, expressly per document and not per page. Recordable documents must be under five years old, must not be notarised, and the request has to name the destination country. Start there, because that step is true regardless of how the rest is answered.
What to do with a page like this
A guide that says a great deal is not published is only worth reading if it tells you what to do next, so here it is.
Treat the telephone as the primary source, not the internet. The one official number we could verify is the ministry’s in Mogadishu, and a family with relatives in Somalia will usually reach the right office faster through them than through any search. Get the answer in writing afterwards, even if it arrives as a message rather than a letter, because an answer you cannot show to an airline or a mortuary is not yet usable.
Meanwhile, do the two things that are certain. Order several original death certificates from Texas rather than one, because every destination that publishes anything asks for originals. And send at least one through the Texas authentication route early, because it is the slowest step you control and the only one that does not depend on an answer from anyone else.
What this page will not do is give you a document list, a container specification, a burial rule, a fee or a timescale for Somalia. None of those is published anywhere we could reach, and inventing them would be worse than saying so.
Questions families ask about a return to Somalia
- Is there a Somali consulate in Texas?
- No. The Texas Secretary of State’s directory of consular offices in Texas does not list Somalia, and the two addresses we tried for a Somali embassy in the United States did not connect at all.
- What does Somalia require for remains arriving from abroad?
- We could not establish it. No Somali government page we could reach sets out a document list, a container rule, a burial deadline or a fee, and this guide does not invent one.
- What can we start on today?
- The Texas end. Order several original death certificates and send at least one for state authentication, which is the first step of the chain that applies to any country outside the Apostille Convention.
Sources checked and case confirmation
Sources checked September 22, 2026 on the Somali Ministry of Foreign Affairs site, its Find our Embassy Abroad page read both by plain fetch and in a script-running browser, its diaspora overview and its card services pages; the consular services menu of the United States mission for Somalia; two plausible addresses for a Somali embassy in the United States, neither of which connected; the Texas Secretary of State directory of consular offices in Texas; the HCCH status table of the Apostille Convention, read in full and searched; and the Texas Secretary of State pages on authentication and on requesting a universal apostille. What this page deliberately does not claim: that Somalia has or does not have a consular office in the United States, because we could not establish either; any Somali document list, container rule, burial deadline, fee or timescale, because none is published where we could reach it; and anything about conditions inside Somalia, airports, flights, routes or carriers. No airline, route or crate specification is stated here, and no individual is named. Contact Vargas-London with the region in Somalia and where your relative is now, without sending medical or identity documents through the inquiry form.
