Main points
- Land that cannot be privatized includes public lands, lands under transport and natural facilities, forestry, water resources, defense, and other special categories.
- There are exceptions for the free transfer of land into private ownership to property owners and citizens who received land before 2002.
What cannot be privatized / Photo Pixabay
Ukrainians have the right to privatize the land they use and that meets the criteria set by law. However, there are types of land whose privatization is prohibited by law.
What lands cannot be registered as property?
Lawyers from the Arzinger law firm, Maryna Sharapa and Olena Yurets, told Channel 24 in a comment that there are currently quite a few restrictions on land privatization.
Legislative provisions provide that communal and state-owned lands that cannot be transferred to private ownership include:
- public lands of settlements (streets, embankments, beaches, parks, squares, boulevards, cemeteries, etc.);
- land under railways, roads, air and pipeline transport;
- lands under objects of the nature reserve fund, for example, dendrological parks and zoological parks created before the adoption of the Law of Ukraine “On the Nature Reserve Fund”, historical, cultural and health-improving purposes, which have special ecological, health-improving, scientific, aesthetic and historical-cultural value;
- forestry lands, except for the transfer of ownership to citizens and legal entities of closed land plots with a total area of up to 5 hectares as part of peasant, farm and other farm lands;
- water fund lands, except for the transfer of ownership to citizens and legal entities of closed natural water bodies with a total area of up to 3 hectares;
- land plots used to support the activities of state authorities and local self-government bodies;
- artificially created land plots;
- lands of nuclear energy and space systems;
- defense lands;
- land plots in the exclusion and unconditional resettlement zones contaminated as a result of the Chernobyl disaster;
- land plots assigned to state institutions of vocational education, professional pre-higher education, higher education, including sectoral academies of sciences.
Marina Sharapa
Partner, Co-Head of the Transport and Infrastructure Practice at Arzinger Law Firm
Along with this, we draw your attention to the fact that during martial law, the free transfer of state and municipal land to private ownership is prohibited.
However, as an exception, there are the following cases of free transfer of land plots into private ownership:
- to owners of real estate objects (buildings, structures) located on such land plots;
- to citizens of Ukraine to whom such land plots were transferred for use before January 1, 2002.
Four important steps: how to check a plot of land before buying?
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Before purchasing a land plot in Ukraine, it is important to check the availability of a cadastral number and the compliance of the area, location, intended purpose, and form of ownership.
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It is necessary to check the information about the owner in the State Register of Real Property Rights, the history of disputes through the Unified State Register of Court Decisions, as well as the original documents confirming ownership.
Experts advise that after receiving information from different sources, you should compare them. In practice, there are often situations when the area in the cadastre does not match the data in the register, or the owner's name is incorrectly indicated, or different purposes of the plot are specified.