Today thousands of properties appear to be owned by the Forest Service even if the lands in question have been declassified. Thus, each owner is obliged to resort to lengthy and costly litigation in order to secure his property.
The regulation is going to be incorporated into a bill that will go into public consultation in September and shortly after its passing it will be put into full effect. As the Deputy Minister of Digital Governance explained to Sunday’s “Free Press”. Konstantinos Kyranakis, “there are many cases of owners who, over the years, have had an area designated as forest that affected their property. Based on this deed of designation, the State declared ownership. That’s where the well-known Objection Committees came in and when they ended up vindicating the owner against the State which brought about the act of declassification but in the meantime the Land Registry had finished, the property could not return to its real owner. The result was that the owner ends up in the courts, in which he is vindicated, but it is absurd,” explains the deputy minister.
With the provision that will come, as Mr. Kyranakis points out, “as long as there is a registered title in the old mortgage registry and the State has declared its ownership only because of the designated forest area and there is a declassification deed following a decision of the Objections Committee, it will be sufficient for to transcribe the title, to register the property right, i.e. in the functioning Land Registry”.
Thus, with the new arrangement, any owner who has succeeded in issuing a decision of objections against the forest map, will be able to correct the registration in his favor at the land office, without inconvenience and avoiding the courts.
WITH A FEW CLICKS ON THE COMPUTER
But what is the procedure that the owner will follow? With a few clicks from his computer, he will be able to achieve the declassification of his area through a request. As soon as the bill is passed, there will be a special section on the website of the Land Registry, through which it will be possible to request a correction.
More specifically, the process will resemble that of a manifest error correction request. The citizen, after entering ktimatologio.gr and the special section that will be designed, will attach the necessary documents that will be requested and request the declassification.
Pending objections and manifest errors
The objections filed to the forest maps exceeded 330,000, while to this day the number of objections and requests for manifest errors that are still pending remains high.
A total of 334,938 objections had been submitted, which concern over 2.6 million acres, an area corresponding to 1.9% of the country. The most objections to forest maps were submitted in Attica (28,552), Chania (20,818), Ioannina (17,305), Laconia (15,478), followed by Larissa, Messinia and Aitoloakarnania.
As early as April, in an effort to reduce the volume of objections, the Ministry of Environment and Energy gave a directive to give priority to obvious errors. That is, it refers to requests that have an incorrect depiction of the nature of land owned by citizens and entities on the forest map and contradicts the real data of the historical and recent orthophoto map.
As explained to Sunday’s “Free Press” by the Secretary General of Forests of the Ministry of Forestry Stathis Stathopoulos, “after Easter, the Objections Committees are rapidly examining cases throughout the country, that is to say, progress is being made and obvious errors have been prioritized”. The general secretary reminded that before Easter, the bar associations were in abstention, while after Easter, with the exception of one or two cases of prefectures that continued, the abstention of the lawyers stopped and the Objections Committees are back in full operation.
The Ministry of Internal Affairs proceeded to prioritize the obvious errors in order to achieve, on the one hand, the progress of the works for the total sanction of the forest map within the given deadlines and, on the other hand, with their implementation against the background of the forest map, to be a guide and a tool for the Commission’s judgment in neighboring to these objections, in the next stage of examination.
It is reminded that requests for the correction of an obvious error are submitted free of charge both electronically to the Land Registry and in person to the local Forest Directorates.
In relation to the supporting documents for the correction of the map due to an obvious error, the interested party should submit: relevant application to the Forestry Directorate, property contract, E9, photocopy of ID, coordinates of the area in EGSA 87 and documents from the Administration (e.g. grant, deed of designation, engineer’s certificate for building before 1955, etc.).
#Forest #properties #Transfers #unblocked #legislation #provide
