Lawyers involved in such declarations normally cover themselves well. A
I don't think this is fair. The job of a lawyer, peace commissioner, commissioner for oaths, etc who takes a statutory declaration is simply to confirm tha the person making the declaration was satisfactorily identified, and that they made the declaration in the presence of the lawyer, etc. They are not at all concerned with the contents of the declaration — they don't read it; they don't know what it's about; and they certainlyh don't verify it — how could they? The Commissioner has no more responsibility for establishing that the declaration is true than the celebrant at a wedding has for establishing that the spouses will, in fact, love, honour and cherish one another.
This isn't lawyers "covering themselves"; this is them doing the job they are supposed to do and not doing jobs they are not supposed to do, have no right to do and are not well-positioned to do.
Can you cite any cases in civil law where a false declarant was exposed and penalised ?
Not from memory.
Back in the dawn of time, I was involved in a very junior capacity in a transnational fraud case, involving several parties and some lurid allegations. As is often the case in situations like these, the case was really about which of several innocent parties would bear the loss; the prospect of tracing the fraudsters and recovering from them, was not high. (One of the fraudsters was actualy bankrupted, but the fraud involved tens of millions, and his assets weren't anything like that.) I was acting for a bank that was hoping to recover its money from another bank.
One party put in a statutory declaration made by somebody — let's call him "X" — whose name came up a lot in the allegations of fraud. The fraud attracted a fair bit of notice at the time and, while the case was ongoing, one of broadcasters did an item on it in a current affairs programme which included an interview with X. The following Monday the lawyers for the party who had put in the statutory declaration were back in court to bring to the court's attention new information which had come to their attention; the person who was interviewed in the TV programme as Mr X was not the same person who had made the statutory declaration claiming to be Mr X. The Commissioner before whom the declaration had been made came into court and confirmed that, yes, the person who he saw make the declaration was not the person who appeared in the TV programme.
At this point there was no way of knowing for sure which of the two was the true Mr X (or indeed if either was; Mr X could have been fictional — it was that kind of fraud). The lawyers conceded that the statutory declaration had no probative value and they couldn't rely on it to establish anything; if they wanted to rely on anything it they would have to produce independent evidence. So the case proceeded as if the stat dec had never been put in.
As I recall the Commissioner faced some pointed questioning about what steps he took to verify the identity of persons who came before him, and I don't remember what exactly he had done in this particular instance. The person who had actually made the declaration was never identified so there was no question of penalising them. And that wasn't anyone's priority; my client was focussed on getting its money back, probably at the expense of another bank, and identifying and punishing this person was a sideshow, as far as they were concerned.