Draft Law Regulating the Notarial Profession and Establishing its Legal Framework

In Haiti, as in other civil-law systems, the notary is the officer who authenticates a transaction and thereby gives the resulting deed its evidential force. For land that makes the profession structurally central: the sale, the inheritance settlement and the mortgage all pass through a notary, and the archive of past deeds held by notaries is in practice a large part of the country's land record, in a country with no completed cadastre. This draft law regulates the profession and establishes the framework for its exercise. The preamble reaches back through the specific body of law that has accumulated around it, including the law of 13 April 1938 on the reimbursement of the security deposit lodged by notaries and the law of 13 June 1941 on transmitting archives to a successor notary, and that second reference is telling, because the continuity of a notarial archive across generations is exactly what determines whether a title can still be traced decades later. Prepared under the CIAT as one of four coordinated land instruments transmitted to Parliament.