Troubles in notarizing signatures for foreigners in Vietnam

In Vietnamese law, a judicial office at district level or a notary public office has the legal rights to offer notarization services to foreigners.

However, the job is not as simple as it may seem.

Embarrassment

A notary recollected that he was once required by an expat to notarize his signature on a document written in a strange language.

He admitted that he was embarrassed then because he could not either understand the content of the document or turn down a lawful demand from the service user.

In another case, a Vietnamese-Dutch man brought a long document written in English to a notary public office for notarization.

“The content was all right, just a couple’s promise to marry each other in the future,” said a notary. “It didn’t violate the law or ethical code.”

But the trouble was that the client asked the notary to fill in a block, left empty at the end of the document, with the latter’s telephone number, address, and email.

The notary said she had never faced such a requirement before.

The head of her office had to intervene by asking her staff to notarize the signatures and the content of the document but reject other requests not stipulated in any written regulation.

Another client returned to a notary public office to complain that the agency that had handled her notarized document declined it because the people there did not understand what the notary wrote.

It then turned out that the notary public had written his notarization in Vietnamese.

The client demanded the notary do his task again in the language of the document but the notary turned it down.

Flexibility to meet demands of clients

Phan Van Cheo, head of the Saigon Notary Public Office, said he has received reports on such notarization troubles.

“We just follow Vietnamese laws and regulations. Any request from our clients that doesn’t flout the current law will be accepted,” Cheo said.

Commenting on unwarranted demands from service users, Tu Duong Tuan – head of the judicial aid office under the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Justice – said it is common to see differences in the laws of different nations.

But notarization in Vietnam must conform to the Vietnamese law, he underlined.

Vietnamese cannot ask a foreign notary public office to attest to a document in their mother tongue so the other way round is also impossible, Tuan added.