“May heighten suspicions and create risks of schemes”: the Rada warns of flaws in the law on land under destroyed houses
Kyiv • UNN
The Verkhovna Rada adopted draft law No. 13174, which allows citizens to acquire ownership of land plots under destroyed property without an auction. This decision will be in effect during martial law and for 5 years after its termination, but it may legalize schemes for appropriating land without transparent procedures.
The registration of plots without an auction, where a destroyed object stood, is the correct logic, but without transparent procedures, the law adopted by the Verkhovna Rada in October can legalize schemes for land appropriation and manual decisions on the ground. This is reported by UNN with reference to sources in the Verkhovna Rada.
Details
In early October, the Verkhovna Rada adopted draft law No. 13174, which allows citizens to return or acquire ownership of land plots under destroyed property. This decision will be valid during martial law and for 5 years after its termination.
The document provides citizens whose property was destroyed during the Russian aggression with the opportunity to return or acquire ownership of land plots that were under such objects.
According to the new norms, if the right of ownership to real estate was terminated in the State Register of Real Rights due to its destruction, former owners or their heirs can receive land plots free of charge or through transfer without conducting land auctions.
This decision will be valid during martial law and for 5 years after its termination, with further simplification of procedures - without mandatory development of urban planning documentation, provided that the intended purpose of the plot corresponds to the purpose of the destroyed object.
In addition, the law stipulates that the Ministry of Environmental Protection will have the right to approve the methodology for determining damage caused to land resources as a result of pollution or littering, and diplomatic missions may be exempted from land rent, provided that this is stipulated by international treaties to which the Verkhovna Rada has given its consent.
As a source in the parliament told UNN, "according to the logic of the authors of the draft law, its novelty is to eliminate the long-standing gap between the right to a house and the right to the land under it."
Very often, people had a registered house, but did not have, conditionally speaking, a title deed to the plot: the land was in use, communal or state, unformed without a cadastral number, in apartment buildings the land usually belongs to the community at all and was never registered as joint ownership of co-owners. Therefore, this draft law introduces a temporary procedure for the period of martial law and another five years, which allows former owners or their heirs to register or acquire the right to a plot without an auction exactly where the destroyed object stood. This creates a legal basis for design, permits and reconstruction in the same place with an unchanged intended purpose. At the same time, the fact of housing destruction does not nullify the right in the State Register of Real Rights to real estate - for compensation, a confirmed record of ownership is precisely needed. Therefore, the land mechanism is a separate link that closes the "land tail" and allows us to move forward.
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The UNN interlocutor emphasizes that a number of warnings were voiced regarding this draft law, in particular the opinion that the non-auction mechanism could legalize schemes for land appropriation, and decisions on the ground risk becoming manual and non-competitive.
Classic vulnerabilities are added - cadastral errors of overlapping boundaries, the absence of a clear procedure for apartment buildings, as well as the temptation to dilute environmental requirements under the guise of reconstruction. For this tool to work for people, and not for schemes, public and traceable community decisions with georeferencing, a clear check of compatibility with urban planning plans, a transparent procedure for apartment buildings with protection of minority rights and minimal eco-standards even in a simplified mode are needed. Under these conditions, the law will help, without them - it will reinforce precisely those suspicions.
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