February the 4th, 2022 - Croatian public notaries are looking to Germany and adopting a much more digital approach. To those of us who have utilised public notaries (and their infamous stamps) in this country, this will come as very welcome news.
As Poslovni Dnevnik/Suzana Varosanec writes, the mandate of the new leadership of the Croatian Chamber of Notaries (UHJK) is looking promising and much more digital indeed. Through the continuation of digitalisation of notary services, we can expect even more services to be made available on screen, including a high degree of legal certainty and dispute prevention, and services involving legal affairs which are related to property rights.
Bodies for a new three-year term were elected at the election assembly, and the president is Zvijezdana Raus-Klier. According to the current news, the plan of the Chamber is to further improve business that will facilitate access to citizens and increase legal security when using the services of Croatian public notaries, especially when it comes to public registers such as land registers and court registers.
"Our purpose and task is to be at the service of all citizens, to prevent disputes, provide security for land registry and court register data and in this context we're going to continue to improve the processes and level of service of the notary profession," said Rausch-Klier.
UHJK plans to finalise many new projects which involve the digitalisation of Croatian public notaries, so from the summer onwards, with the help of a new application related to eNotar, it will be possible to establish a company remotely or make changes to an existing one.
Croatian public notaries should also ''be relieved'' of dealing too much with land registers this year, as proposals for land registry entries and the issuance of excerpts will be able to be resolved electronically. In addition to that, a brand new IT system of registers is being developed maintained by the Chamber (wills, anticipated orders and debentures), with the possibility of introducing new digital registers (such as for powers of attorney and notarial deeds).
The entire digitalisation process for Croatian public notaries is in fact the digitalisation of preventive justice, and this in particular is realised within a separate IT system with the highest levels of digital and legal security, under the supervision of HJK, and not through commercial platforms.
With the support of the Ministry of Justice and Administration, Croatian public notaries up and down the country will soon implement the so-called German model for public notaries ''at a distance'', which will certainly be a relief to not only those carrying out these services but those seeking them.
All this will be done through a combination of videoconferencing and electronic identification and insight into a photo of the party in question from their identification document, and then the parties will be in a ''secure virtual room'' together without the need for physical presence in an office.
It is an application that, as was explained, will be easy to use for all involved parties, but at the same time be maximally secure in terms of cyber security, the protection of personal data, cthe onfidentiality of secrets and compliance with regulations on the prevention of money laundering and terrorist financing.
Travel costs will be lower, time (and nerves) will be saved, and people will be able to use their time more economically, while documents generated by e-mail will be "available and stored in a suitable e-form and immediately enforceable in e-registers and e-databases such as the land registry, the court register, tax databases, pension and health insurance databases, and the like.
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