Competition for notaries, report reaches the Ministry: evaluations awaited
The fate of the entrance exam is now in the hands of the offices of Via Arenula. Meanwhile, the complaints of some candidates are being investigated by the Rome Public Prosecutor's Office
A week after the uproar raised around the notary competition - due to the publication (by mistake) on the Notariat's intranet of an excel file with inappropriate judgments and ambiguous coded references next to the names of the 250 candidates who had passed the written test - the internal report requested by the Ministry of Justice to the president of the examining board has arrived at the offices of Via Arenula. To find out, therefore, what the fate of the selection tests will be, we will have to wait for the end of the monitoring procedures of the material provided and the ministerial verdict.
Codacons' warning
In the meantime, however, legal actions were not long in coming. It was Codacons who, on Wednesday 25 February, sent a formal notice to the National Council of Notaries and the Ministry of Justice to protect those who had taken the written exam. The association, in particular, appealed for the need to automatically admit to the oral all candidates who had taken the tests in 2024 and appoint a new examining board.
"In the system of public competitions, the anonymity of written tests is an essential and unfailing principle," he stressed. "The news of the formation and circulation of a document with the names of the candidates, subjective judgements and classification systems not provided for in the competition regulations would go so far as to introduce an element of opacity that would be difficult to reconcile with constitutional principles and the canons of impartiality, good performance and equal access to public offices. Such an arrangement would not make it possible to exclude the possibility that the assessment of the papers was influenced, even indirectly, by factors extraneous to the technical-legal content of the tests'.
Candidates' complaints to the Prosecutor's Office
But that is not all: the mobilisation has also involved - in different ways - those directly concerned. At the moment, in fact, the prosecutors of the Rome Public Prosecutor's Office are examining complaints submitted by some candidates. The files will therefore be examined by magistrates dealing with offences against the public administration and they will assess whether or not there are any criminal profiles;
