Notary Public Offices: Uniform Proceedings Required
One of the national minority rights is freedom of their members to choose their own name according to the cultural and ethnic particularities of the ethnic minority they belong to, as well as the right to use it in the private and public sphere. Should the members of the ethnic minority communities wish to, exercising this right implies, amongst other things, a possibility to have their own and the names of their children registered in their native language and script within the birth and other official records with the Notary Public Offices.
Registering national/ethnic minority community members’ names in their native language and script within the birth records is a precondition for exercising other aspects of national minority rights (e.g. using their original name in private and public life, in ID cards, passports, etc.). This is also one of the rights pertaining to preservation of the ethnic identity and cultural specificities of a minority group. In Serbian legislation this right is regulated by several laws and other regulations.
In 2011, the Serbian and the Provincial Ombudsman of the Autonomous Province (AP) of Vojvodina have sent a joint Recommendation to the Ministry of Executive Government and Local Self-Government concerning the faulty practice of the local Notary Public Offices with the exercise of the citizens’ right to registration of their name in their native language and script within the birth records. Namely, once their names have been registered in Serbian language and in the Cyrillic script, people have the right for their names to be registered also in their own native language. However, some Notary Public Offices have treated these requests same as those requiring a name change or as those for a delayed or additional recording, which are both legally and formally different proceedings from the one requiring simply registering their name in basically two languages, aka scripts at the same time.
It has also been noted that Notary Public Offices have linked this rights with the exercise of the right to official use of the national minority language and script. There have been cases in which the authorities in charge have refused to register people’s names in their native language and script because they were not in official use in the local self-government in question. Such practice is not grounded in the current legislation.
The Provincial Ombudsman has therefore collected data from the authorities in charge with the local self-governments on the territory of the AP of Vojvodina concerning the practice of registering names in ethnic minority languages and scripts.
The data analysis indicates that members of ethnic minorities do exercise this right, though not in its full extent. Most request are filed with the local self-governments where ethnic minority members constitute the majority of the local population. The proceeding itself, be it the basic or the delayed one, is run simply and with no major obstacles, but the Notary Public Offices proceedings must be uniform on the entire territory of the AP of Vojvodina.