ILLEGAL CONSTRUCTIONS IN SOCIALLY OWNED LAND IN KOSOVO - PRIZREN

Identification as a problem and treatment of the illegal use of land of socially owned property in Kosovo, with the focal point in Prizren, is the fundamental body-content of this study paper. The illegal use and exploitation of socially owned land in Kosovo, respectively the construction of residential, commercial and public buildings (non social property) on the socially owned land, is the core subject elaborated in this study. These constructions are considered illegal since they are performed on socially owned land, without any permit, previous approval, and license or similar and this topic hasn’t been discussed or elaborated much in Kosovo. Land, on which the houses/buildings are constructed, at the cadastral official registers in Municipal Cadastral Offices, even today are registered as social ownership; actually, they are in the name of Socially Owned Enterprises (SOE). Consequently, the users of the land automatically are to be considered as illegal occupants, or illegal users of the property of social ownership. The violence of war caused the destruction of public records about public and private rights to land and buildings, including the cadastral and court records and the archives of the enterprises that managed the socially owned land, apartments, and other assets. Property maps, cadastral books, possession lists, and transaction document archives, which comprise of the “authoritative” identification about who has what rights to what land and buildings, have been removed to Serbia. In addition, people avoided the formal transaction recording system and carried out transactions informally for several decades due to transaction taxes and the legal prohibition of transactions between Serbs and Albanians. Therefore, in general, the study represents the research of very complex problems of two interactive systems, the land use in the specific state of social ownership and construction of individual buildings in specific illegal status and social /economic implications as consequences