In this article, the author examines the legal nature and content of a notarial act through the prism of its normative regulation. The author establishes that the legal term «notarial act» is perhaps the most commonly used in the acts of legislation on notary issues. However, despite the long-term use of this term and its indisputable importance in notarial activities, the legislator does not define it either at the constitutional level, or at the legislative level, or at the subordinate legislation level. It is determined that the features of notarial acts are a set of properties which make them distinctive and which can be used to distinguish them from a large volume of legal activities. These features include: the list of notarial acts defined by law; statutory consolidation of the subjective composition of notarial acts; indisputability of a notarial act; procedural form of a notarial act; and payment for a notarial act. The legislatively established list of notarial acts can be divided into the following types: certification of the fact of a citizen’s presence in a certain place, the identity of a citizen with the person depicted in a photograph, transfer of applications of individuals and legal entities to other individuals and legal entities; certification of transactions, the task of which is to certify their legality by a notary, verification of legal capacity; certification of indisputable facts. According to the territorial competence of the bodies authorised to perform notarial acts, they can be classified as follows: acts performed by public and private notaries; acts performed by officials and officers authorised to perform notarial acts; acts performed by officials of local self-government bodies; acts performed by consular offices and diplomatic missions of Ukraine. The indisputability of a notarial act is one of the main principles of notarial activity, which means that a notary may perform a notarial act only if: there is no dispute between the parties concerned regarding the rights and obligations arising from the notarial act; the rights and obligations of the parties concerned are based on legal grounds; and the documents submitted for the performance of the notarial act are valid. Notarial acts are performed in compliance with the procedural form. Violation of this procedure will affect the legality of the notarial act and, therefore, will be a reason for its appeal to the court, and, conversely, its non-violation will confirm the legality of the notarial act. A notarial act is a functionally structured system of procedural actions performed in accordance with the procedure established by law by an individual authorised by the state who carries out notarial activities in a state notary office, state notary archive or independent professional notarial activity, in particular, certifies rights and facts of legal significance and performs other actions provided for by the legislation on notaries in order to give them legal validity.
Read full abstract