'Notary prevents the disintegration of the legal system'

The notary profession is like a vaccine; it prevents the legal system from collapsing. This is how outgoing CNUE President Ádám Tóth expressed the role of the notary profession in Europe during a virtual meeting of the CNUE on the future of Europe.

The meeting was organized in conjunction with the Conference on the Future of Europe. This is an initiative of the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union, and the European Commission. The goal: to give citizens and civil society organizations, such as notaries, a voice in developing recommendations for the European Union to build the Europe of tomorrow. To this end, 4,000 meetings were organized across Europe, with a total of 290,000 participants. The Council of Notaries of Europe (CNUE) has drawn up concrete proposals (pdf, 108 kB) based on the daily work of 45,000 European notaries and their 200,000 staff.

Role of the notary
Representatives of the European institutions, such as European Commissioner for Justice Didier Reynders, discussed the role of notaries in the rule of law at the CNUE meeting on December 7. European Parliament Vice-President Vera Jourova spoke about connecting with citizens. "You are the face of justice to the people." Various CNUE proposals were also discussed during the first session.

Big Tech
Several speakers, representing consumers, called on the European Commission to establish sufficient countervailing power against the increasingly influential Big Tech companies, such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Jens Bormann, president of the Bundesnotarkammer (Bundesnotarkammer), argued that the internet's global nature favors monopolists, and that this position allows them to evade the rule of law. He cited, for example, that terms of delivery keep conflicts internal and thus outside the public legal sphere. Private cryptocurrencies and identification services were also cited as examples. The German president concluded by calling for the rule of law to continue to be guaranteed online by states or the European Union.

Digitalization of law
The meeting also addressed developments specifically related to digitization in the notarial field. The pandemic has accelerated the digitization of notarial work. Several notaries explained how various processes have been digitized. Considerable attention was paid to the necessity of notarial services for legal certainty and how to ensure this now and in the future, for everyone.