Institutional insensitivity: A doctrinal critique of decree on appointment of Notaries Public.

1. Introduction

Decree No. 2025/316 aims to consolidate the notarial profession under a unified regime. While ostensibly neutral, the decree fails to accommodate core features of Cameroon’s bijural framework and entrenched regional legal identities. 

Its insensitivity lies not in intent, but in structure: a form of legal design that bypasses foundational instruments, misreads the configuration of legal education and practice, and imposes rigid centralisation in a system that remains constitutionally plural.

2. Bijural Constitutional Design and the Problem of Uniformity

Article 68 of the 1996 Constitution preserves regional legal traditions that predate reunification. The Southern Cameroons legal heritage, rooted in the Common Law, includes the lawyer-notary model, in which advocacy and notarial functions coexist. Decree No. 2025/316 enacts a uniform institutional model that abolishes this hybrid role, without reference to the constitutional continuity clause. This creates a doctrinal inconsistency: the decree operates as if the constitutional preservation of pre-existing legal orders has lapsed, when in fact it remains binding.

3. Hierarchical Defect: Decree Versus Statute

Cameroonian legal hierarchy recognises decrees as subordinate to statutes and the Constitution. The 1990 Bar Law and the 2019 Law on Regional Authorities are legislative instruments; both preserve Anglophone lawyer-notarial practice and require regional consultation for legal reforms affecting special-status regions. Decree No. 2025/316, issued without consultation, seeks to amend or override these laws by executive fiat. This inversion of hierarchy renders the decree constitutionally and procedurally insensitive, as confirmed by legal authorities on record.

4. Institutional Insensitivity to Legal Education and Practice

By requiring all future notaries to be trained at ENAM under a civil law curriculum, the decree excludes common law legal education as a valid pathway to notarial competence. 

It ignores the structural reality that common law lawyers are trained and licensed to perform notarial functions under their own system of legal reasoning. 

The decree is institutionally insensitive to the existing infrastructure of Anglophone legal training and disregards a 2014 resolution by the Cameroon Bar Association calling for permanent recognition of the lawyer-notary model.

5. Jurisdictional Overreach and Geographic Centralisation

The decree assigns notaries to regional jurisdictions anchored to courts of first instance. In practical terms, this implies that rural and peri-urban populations—such as those in Akwaya, Wum, or Nkambe—must travel to distant regional centres for basic notarial services. 

This geographic rigidity ignores infrastructural deficits and the logistical realities of the legal marketplace in Anglophone Cameroon. It effectively creates legal deserts by design, thereby arginalizing communities from equal access to justice.

6. Procedural Insensitivity to Consultation Requirements

Section 328 of Law No. 2019/024 requires prior consultation with regional assemblies for all normative reforms affecting special status regions. 

No such consultation occurred prior to the promulgation of Decree No. 2025/316. This failure nullifies the procedural legitimacy of the decree within its intended regions of operation.

The decree is not merely insensitive—it is ultra vires in scope, insofar as it purports to govern without fulfilling statutory preconditions.

7. Doctrinal Blindness to Legal Function Differentiation

The decree adopts a civil law conception of the notary as a public official engaged in ex officio authentic acts. It then exports this model to a legal culture where notarial work is fundamentally private, client-oriented, and judicially supervised. 

This transplant fails to account for functional divergence across legal traditions. As a result, the decree replaces a working system with one that is alien to its host context—without safeguards for transitional jurisprudence or differentiated application.

8. Conclusion: Law Without Accommodation

Decree No. 2025/316 is structurally incompatible with Cameroon’s bijural commitments, statutory hierarchy, decentralised governance, and institutional practices. Its insensitivity is not merely political—it is technical, doctrinal, and legal. 

To enforce this decree without structural reform or legal recalibration is to substitute formality for functionality, and uniformity for justice. As such, the decree ought to be suspended, revised, or withdrawn—not as a matter of sentiment, but of legal design integrity.

By Dr Barrister Paul Chiy: He is a multi-qualified legal professional with decades of experience as a Barrister, Solicitor-Advocate, Arbitrator, Chartered Legal Executive, and Academic. He holds full rights of audience in England, Wales, France, and Central Africa, and is a Fellow of both the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators and the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives. A former Magistrate, he advises government departments, regulators, and private clients across public, regulatory, and commercial sectors

This article was first published in The Guardian Post Edition No:3519 of Wednesday July 30, 2025