Legal Certainty for the Parties to a Notarial Deed Minute Not Signed by a Notary Due to Death

Abstract

The death of a notary prior to signing a deed minute generates a normative void that existing Indonesian notarial law has yet to adequately resolve. This study examines two central issues: the form and limits of legal protection available to parties in respect of an unsigned deed minute following a notary's death, and the legal remedies accessible to those parties to enforce the substantive content of the agreement. Employing normative legal research through statute, conceptual, and case approaches, this study analyzes primary legal materials including Law Number 30 of 2004 on Notarial Office as amended by Law Number 2 of 2014 (UUJN-P), the Indonesian Civil Code, and the Regulation of the Minister of Law Number 22 of 2025. The findings establish that a deed minute unsigned due to a notary's death is not extinguished in juridical terms but undergoes a degradation of status from an authentic deed to a private deed, retaining limited evidentiary force pursuant to Articles 1869 and 1867 of the Civil Code, provided the parties acknowledge it. This condition is rooted in the normative obscurity of Article 44 paragraph (5) of UUJN-P, which regulates only violations by a living notary and fails to accommodate overmacht arising from death — a deficiency empirically demonstrated to generate divergent practitioner interpretations, thereby directly impairing legal certainty. Non-litigious remedies, namely deed cancellation followed by the execution of a new deed before a different notary, facilitated by the MPND-appointed Temporary Notary Official, constitute the most appropriate resolution mechanism.