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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November the 18th, 2021 - The work and processes of Croatian public notaries is set to change, and it seems that the move is likely to make life that bit easier for people needing their services.

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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August the 19th, 2021 - The Croatian Chamber of Notaries is involved in an international project called ''Undisputed Trials in Europe/ Nesporno sudovanje u Europi'', which is being co-financed by the European Commission (EC).

As Poslovni Dnevnik/Suzana Varosanec writes, the project the Croatian Chamber of Notaries is involved in has the purpose of studying and analysing the procedures within the jurisdiction(s) that Austria, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia have all respectively entrusted to notaries.

In the first place, this refers to probate proceedings which in almost all of the aforementioned countries, to a greater or lesser extent, are carried out by public notaties as commissioners of the Municipal Courts in whose territory they have their seat.

The project also includes CNUE - Council of Notaries of the European Union, which has developed the European Notary Network (ENN), a platform that serves notaries public in 22 European Union member states (which have a public notary services available in them) for mutual communication and assistance in all situations when working on cases with an element of foreignness to them.

In addition to the above, they were also involved in the project "Inheritance in Europe/Nasljedjivanje u Europi'', and the purpose of that was to analyse the application of the EU Inheritance Regulation over the past five years in the territory of 22 EU member states and to identify the European Commission's recommendations for the procedure of future amendments to that same regulation.

The results of the analysis are expected in the second half of 2022, and the application of this regulation through one procedure for all assets avoids the implementation of special probate procedures in all member states of the bloc.

The transfer of ownership of property to heirs under a decision on inheritance from another country is carried out according to the European Certificate of Inheritance (EPN), which was also introduced by the same regulation.

Here in the Republic of Croatia, it is issued by a public notary who issues a decision on inheritance and it isn't necessary to conduct long and expensive procedures for recognising a foreign court decision, which speeds up the process and reduces the costs of claiming inheritance.

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