Realization of the ownership competence in land relations by local councils

Abstract

Land plots owned by territorial communities of villages, settlements, cities, city districts can be combined as objects of their rights with the emergence of their joint ownership and transfer of these objects to the management of district and regional councils, representing the common interest of territorial communities villages, settlements, cities. At the same time, territorial communities do not lose their ownership rights, but the ownership of oblast and rayon does not arise. Only the legal regime of communal property and the authority authorized to manage it changes. Regional or district council become owners instead of the corresponding village, settlements, cities or city districts, depending on which territorial communities unify their property, including land plots.

            Part 3 of article 86 of the Land Code of Ukraine established that subject of the right of joint ownership of land plots of territorial communities may be rayon and oblast councils. Such position of the legislator seems controversial, because art. 80 of the Land Code of Ukraine does not call rayon and oblast councils as the subject of ownership of land.

Thus, rayon and oblast councils, on the one hand, are defined as managers of united land plots, which are the objects of the right of joint ownership of territorial communities, and on the other – recognizes their right of joint ownership on land plots of territorial communities.

One of the possible solutions to problems related to the management of united land plots of communal property is the use of the norms of the civil law institute of trust ownership. This institution is borrowed from Anglo-American law and according to part 2 of art. 316 of the Civil Code of Ukraine is defined as a special type of property right. Under such a model of legal regulation, the ownership of two subjects comes into ownership on the united land: nominal owners – territorial communities of villages, settlements and cities (founders of trust property) and trusted owners - rayon or oblast council. It is the rayon or oblast council that will manage the united land in the interests and in favour of the territorial communities of villages, settlements and cities as founders of trust ownership.