ArmInfo. Armenia wants to fully clarify the Real Estate Cadastre by January 1, 2030. The National Assembly of the Republic of Armenia will discuss amendments to the laws "On State Registration of Property Rights" and "On Urban Development" in the first reading at its plenary session on June 18.
Introducing the amendments, Deputy Head of the Cadastre Committee Nane Ghazaryan noted that the need to develop the draft stemmed from existing legal and factual issues in the area of state registration of real estate rights, such as, in particular, the lack of a unified and clear procedure for identifying and correcting errors (both quantitative and qualitative) in cadastral maps and state registration data, as well as an unclear division of powers between the committee, land surveyors, and interested parties. These issues often lead to administrative-judicial disputes, delays in the process of registering real estate rights, and legal uncertainty. The draft aims to address these issues by defining a classification of the nature of errors, legal grounds for their correction, and procedural guarantees based on the principles of administrative proceedings. At the same time, the need to develop the rules proposed in the draft has become more pressing in the context of the precedent-setting decision of the Cassation Court of the Republic of Armenia dated October 2, 2023, in an administrative case, which stated that, based on the content of the state's obligation to protect the property rights of an individual, state authorities, in particular the committee and heads of communities that have the right to initiate the correction of an error on the cadastral map, are obliged to take such an initiative and thereby remove the obstacle to the state registration of the rights of an individual caused by this error.
The draft proposes supplementing the Law "On State Registration of Property Rights" with a new article, the provisions of which clarify the procedure for identifying errors made during the state registration of rights to real estate on cadastral maps, their legal correction, and the state registration of changes. The package details the nature of errors in the designation of a real estate property on a cadastral map and the types of such errors: quantitative (surface, linear dimensions, geometric shape), qualitative (target and operational value, ownership), and legal grounds for error correction: legal documents, measurement data, agreements with owners of adjacent land plots, and administrative procedures conducted by the Cadastre Committee.
The draft laws also outline the procedure for conducting administrative procedures: filing an application, the content of the submitted application, conducting inspections, the possibility of notification by the authorized body (the Cadastral Committee), the duties and professional responsibility of qualified persons for the accuracy of the data submitted, and the powers of the Committee to initiate administrative procedures, conduct research, and decide on corrections or rejections. The draft establishes new, more effective rules for cases where a boundary corrected on a plan coincides with the boundary of buildings and structures that have received state registration or were entered into the register as part of the initial state registration of rights. To further simplify the process of making corrections, the draft also clearly stipulates that disagreements between parties to proceedings initiated by the Committee do not prevent corrections from being made if the proceedings contain sufficient evidence to justify them. As a result of the amendments introduced by the draft, the process for making corrections to cadastral maps will be further clarified, the scope of corrections to cadastral maps will be expanded, and the required documents and the procedure for their submission will be clearly defined.
The proposed provisions necessitate the introduction of corresponding amendments and additions to the Law "On Urban Development." Specifically, after submitting information on the corrected purpose and/or operational significance of a land plot, the authorized state body must, within six months, include it in the current state urban development cadastre map. In this case, current corrections of the transferred data must be carried out annually by December 31 of each year, and a full summary must be completed by January 1, 2030.
