National Assembly Delegates of Nghe An Delegation Give Comments on 3 Contents of Amendment to Notary Law

Comrade Nguyen Khac Dinh - Member of the Party Central Committee, Vice Chairman of the National Assembly presided.

Speaking at the discussion, Mr. Hoang Minh Hieu - Standing Member of the National Assembly's Law Committee, delegate of Nghe An delegation, proposed to study and add to the draft law regulations on the title of notary assistant.

According to the delegate of Nghe An delegation, currently notary assistants are an indispensable part of notary organizations and are performing a large amount of work in these organizations.

“According to a recent research report, in Hanoi, there are notaries who notarize an average of 242 contracts in a day. According to this research, each notary, if trying their best, cannot perform more than 8 contracts per day. This shows that in order to complete such a large volume of work, notaries need great support from assistants, both in content and form in notarization activities,” analyzed delegate Hoang Minh Hieu.

Besides, the activities of notary assistants are having a great impact on the interests of the parties involved in notarial activities.

Because in reality, notary assistants participate in most stages of the notarization process, from receiving documents, consulting on documents, drafting documents, supporting transaction signing, arranging and organizing transaction signing, updating documents, data, etc.

With such a large scope of work, the activities of notary assistants directly affect the quality of notarization activities, as well as the interests of related customers, especially in information security.

Therefore, according to the delegate, if there are no specific regulations on rights and obligations, there is no basis for notary assistants to have the qualifications to communicate and handle work; as well as unclear specific obligations to ensure the rights of customers.

Through consulting the experience of the laws of countries such as France, Germany, Russia, Korea... all have regulations on the rights and obligations of notary assistants.

“For the above reasons, we believe that it is necessary to study and add more regulations on the conditions, rights and obligations of notary assistants in the draft law,” said the delegate.

In addition, Mr. Hoang Minh Hieu suggested that it is necessary to supplement regulations on the use of electronic documents and digitized documents in notarization activities.

The current draft Law has devoted Section 3, Chapter V with 3 articles to regulate electronic notarization. However, the electronic notarization mentioned in this section mainly regulates notarization performed by electronic means to create electronic notarized documents, but has not mentioned the use of electronic documents and digitized documents in notarization activities.

Meanwhile, electronic documents and digitized documents are increasingly popular in daily life. Especially now, with the success of Project 06, there are many types of electronic documents being applied in daily economic and social transactions.

However, according to delegate Hoang Minh Hieu, the draft Law has not clarified whether electronic notarization accepts this type of electronic document; there are no specific regulations on the recognition and use of electronic documents as a basis for notarization; there are no regulations allowing the copying of content from electronic to paper and vice versa.

Therefore, the drafting agency needs to carefully research to have comprehensive solutions on the use of electronic documents and digitized documents in public activities.

The third issue that the delegate from Nghe An mentioned was perfecting regulations on notary databases.

Article 62 of the 2014 Notary Law stipulates the construction of a notary database according to a decentralized model, and up to now, after 8 years of implementing the law, 58/63 provinces and cities have completed this content.

However, Mr. Hoang Minh Hieu commented: Recent practice shows that the construction of a distributed database has certain limitations. Each province and city chooses a different technology platform, design standards, functions, and tasks, and there is no connection, so it is not effective.

Therefore, the delegates expressed their high agreement with the provisions in Article 63 of the draft Law on the notary database being built synchronously and uniformly; being centrally managed and decentralized from the central to local levels.

However, the current draft Law has not clarified the relationship and inheritance between the notary database expected to be built according to the provisions of the draft Law and the existing database according to the provisions of the 2014 Notary Law. At the same time, it has not clarified how the maintenance and value of existing data in 58 distributed databases will be handled when the 2024 Notary Law comes into effect but the centralized notary database has not been completed.

“We believe that there should be specific regulations on this issue in the transitional provisions of the draft law and, if necessary, clearly specify the deadline for completing the construction of a notary database according to a centralized model, to avoid prolonging the time and affecting the implementation of relevant provisions of the draft law,” commented delegate Hoang Minh Hieu.