As Poslovni Dnevnik/Marija Crnjak writes, the Croatian Chamber of Public Notaries has announced that all Croatian public notaries will be able to conduct official activities from the summer of next year without the physical presence of the parties in the notary offices, which will take a great weight off the shoulders of many people.
This means that all natural and legal persons, if they cannot come to the notary’s office in person, whether for personal reasons simply because they’re not around at that moment in time, can, with technical prerequisites prescribed by law and rules of procedure, communicate with the notary remotely and realise an electronic public document in the full sense of the word. The legal and bylaw basis for the alteration has been created by the Ministry of Justice and Administration in cooperation with the aforementioned Chamber.
The official action itself will be carried out with the highest measures of legal and computer security, and the working principle was adopted according to the model accepted for notaries in the Federal Republic of Germany, which is technically and legally very demanding, but also gives the best and most reliable results.
As is widely known, Croatian public notaries take actions that are of great importance to those requiring them, whether they concern real estate/property issues, companies, wills or bequests. With the new system of work, Croatian public notaries will be able to remotely determine the identity of the person needing a service and, equally importantly, determine their right and serious will regarding the intended legal transaction. In the same way, the notary will be able advise the parties regarding the consequences of what they want to do and explain to them what possibilities various laws provide as a possible solution for their legal situation. It will be possible to remotely book an appointment with a notary, as well as to conduct preparatory meetings so that the needed document that will be created based on this procedure is fully legal and in accordance with any particular request.
According to the president of the Chamber, Raus Klier, this project and its realisation are a continuation of the digitalisation of the public notary service.
“The Notary Chamber itself, as well as all of its members, invest a lot of time and resources in the development of a digital platform for remote work, but also in increasing the level of legal certainty. In addition to this project, we recently, in cooperation with the Ministry of Justice and Administration of the Republic of Croatia, introduced the e-Enforcement system with the aim of modernising enforcement proceedings using e-communication and electronic forms,” explained Raus Klier.
The work of Croatian public notaries in the remote sense will be realised through a special application (app) connected to the eNotar system in which all notaries have worked from the very beginning of 2018. People will be able to be with the notary in a so-called “secure virtual room”, without the risk of losing their privacy and disclosing any sensitive data, with video communication for all parties involved. They will be presented with a document that the notary compiles and interprets and adapts to their specific needs.
The parties will identify themselves with triple security measures: videoconferencing, notary inspection of their photograph from official records and an e-signature of the highest security level provided by the eIDAS directive.
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