LANDOWNERSHIP IN RUSSIAN FEDERATION: HOW GOOD LAND ADMINISTRATION CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE

LANDOWNERSHIP IN RUSSIAN FEDERATION:  HOWGOODLAND

ADMINISTRATION CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE

(Reissued as received.)

GENEVA, 6 February (UNECE) -- The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) is launching the publication of its Land Administration Review of the Russian Federation in Moscow today.  The Review describes the history of landownership in the Russian Federation and outlines the current legal and institutional framework for land administration.  It details the progress that the Russian Federation has made since the early 1990s and also makes recommendations to remedy some of the failings.

The Russian Federation experienced sweeping changes in land tenure at the end of the twentieth century with its land privatization, the development of land markets and a whole new system of agricultural holdings.

Over 50 million people and legal entities have acquired private ownership rights in land and by the end of the 1990s, some 7.6 per cent of the Russian Federation’s territory was privately owned.  This percentage represents 129 million hectares of land and is comparable to the area of continental Western Europe.  Most of this land is agricultural and located in the regions with the most favourable climatic and soil conditions.

The UNECE Review concludes that, in theory at least, all the elements necessary for an effective land policy are in place.  However, implementation remains a problem, because:

-- Several competing agencies are involved in land administration.  This undermines the effectiveness of the system and leads to conflicts of interests;

-- Land policy implementation is not comprehensive and is incoherent;

-- Control of land policy and its implementation is ineffective;

-- The transfer of State land to different administrative levels of government and the transfer of agricultural land are stipulated by law, but the relevant institutions are not ready to implement such measures;

-- Land-use planning in terms of overall concepts, institutional functions and implementation procedures is not effectively organized;

-- Land administration is more developed from the standpoint of State control than of legal security for private owners.

The most controversial elements of State land and property administration in the Russian Federation are the mixture of public-law and private-law functions within one State authority, and the interaction between technical systems of real property recording and the State system of registration of real property rights and transactions.

An obvious conflict of interest arises when decisions on land and other real property are taken by the agency that also has the authority to represent the interests of the owner of the (federal) property.  This situation is a legacy of Soviet land law, according to which land was exclusively in State ownership.  The UNECE Review warns that the ability of one owner (i.e. the State) to influence the content of cadastres and registers reduces the confidence of other parties in the reliability of the market infrastructure and the real property market in general.

Finally, the registration of agricultural and other rural land is also in disarray.  Rural properties have not been recorded in cadastral maps.  Land privatization and farm restructuring cannot work until every piece of land is given a cadastral identifier and its owner is entered in the unified register of real estate rights and transactions.

For more information about land administration in the Russian Federation, please contact: 

Guennadi Vinogradov, UNECE Environment and Human Settlements Division, Palais des Nations, office 330, CH - 1211 Geneva 10, Switzerland, tel.:  +41 (0) 22 917 23 74, fax:  +41 (0) 22 917 01 07, e-mail:  guennadi.vinogradov@unece.org, Web site:  http://www.unece.org

or:

Christina von Schweinichen, UNECE Environment and Human Settlements Division, Palais des Nations, office 340, CH - 1211 Geneva 10, Switzerland, tel.:  +41 (0) 22 917 23 88, fax:  +41 (0) 22 917 01 07, e-mail:  christina.schweinichen@unece.org, Web site:  http://www.unece.org

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