Unclaimed Land Shares: Trends in the Development of Legislative Regulation

Abstract

The article discusses current aspects of recognizing land shares from agricultural lands as unclaimed and turning them into municipal property. The importance of the topic is due to the importance of agricultural lands, which act as a guarantee for the development of agriculture in the country, as one of the strategic directions of the state in the field of food security in the Russian Federation. Recognizing land shares as unclaimed and registering them as municipal property is one of the important legally established ways of putting agricultural land into circulation against the backdrop of a decrease in the number of arable land areas in the state. Over the last decade, the state has been concerned about this situation and has been taking various measures aimed at preserving and increasing agricultural land. At the same time, with state regulation and the desire to preserve agricultural lands, it is necessary to respect the rights and legitimate interests of land shareholders as the weakest party in such land legal relations, take into account the vulnerability of such citizens due to their legal ignorance and lack of education on the part of local governments in the matter registration of rights to land shares. At the same time, local government bodies should strictly comply with the requirements of the law regulating the procedure for recognizing land shares as unclaimed, in order to guarantee constitutional protection of private property rights to land shares, as well as reduce the number of litigations in which the courts establish gross violations of the procedure for approving lists of land plots. It is especially important that municipalities comply with this procedure within the framework of the legal innovations which provided local governments with the right to acquire municipal property after January 1, 2025.