The Ministry of Justice has successfully upgraded its various services, so that it now takes no more than 60 minutes for beneficiaries to obtain notarial services from notary offices across the Kingdom, This follows a campaign of reforms launched by the Minister of Justice and President of the Supreme Judicial Council, Dr. Walid Al-Samaani, targeting the Kingdom’s judicial sector, with the aim of overcoming obstacles in the notary sector and ensuring beneficiaries have access to secure and fast notary services.
According to the Ministry’s reports, a high-level committee has reached a number of recommendations aimed at raising the standard of notary services, including allowing objections to property registration through a specific electronic mechanism for objection and complaint procedures regarding the work of notaries and municipalities, and linking this to the filing of cases with the General Court.
The Ministry has worked to establish the principle of transparency by launching the Real Estate Indicators Portal www.moj.gov.sa , allowing users to access information on transactions traded and executed during a specific time period in both the Hijri and Gregorian calendars, and to review the number of transactions, properties, and their financial values in riyals, as well as their areas in square meters.
The Ministry of Justice had formed an official committee in partnership with the Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs tasked with receiving objections, verifying them, and communicating with users within a period not exceeding 10 days, The reforms undertaken aimed to enhance the investment environment in the Kingdom in line with Saudi Vision 2030, by providing an electronic service for the transfer of company ownership, where real estate clearance requests were processed electronically, while a menu was added to its website to streamline a number of procedures.
The new reforms also established a mechanism to expedite procedures for rectifying property registration errors. This was done in coordination with the Board of Grievances to adopt a process for real estate dispute cases, with the primary goal of swiftly adjudicating real estate claims and restoring rights to their rightful owners.
The Ministry has enhanced notary services through a digital transformation campaign covering a number of procedures, ranging from electronic land title registration to using the Justice Portal to access real estate registry information and update its data, to requesting property clearance, and issuing replacement deeds for lost or damaged documents. These reforms contributed to raising the Kingdom’s ranking this year from 32nd to 24th in the World Bank’s Property Rights Index.
