Procedural competence of State Service for Geodesia, Cartography and Cadaster in land court disputes

The article examines the problematic aspects of the procedural legal personality of the State Service of Ukraine for geodesy, cartography and cadastre as a central body of executive power, which at the same time performs the function of state control over the use and protection of land of all categories and forms of ownership (with the exception of cases of decision-making by local councils on implementation of the function of state control by the executive committees of such councils), and is empowered to transfer state-owned land for agricultural purposes into the ownership or use of individuals and legal entities, and into the communal ownership of territorial communities. Judicial practice shows the existence of two diametrically opposed approaches to the defined procedural legal personality of the State Geocadastre, in particular, in cases following a prosecutor’s lawsuit filed on the basis of Art. 24 of the Law «On the Prosecutor’s Office» when representing the interests of the state in court in the event that the protection of the legitimate interests of the state is not carried out or is improperly carried out by the subject of power, to whose competence the relevant powers are assigned. The first approach boils down to the recognition of the State Geocadastre as a plaintiff in any cases related to the violation of land legislation; the second - consists in the fact that the State Geocadastre is a plaintiff only in clearly defined cases, and therefore in the absence of a body that should protect the violated interests of the state, the proper plaintiff is the prosecutor. Depending on which approach is used in a specific court case, the extent of procedural legal personality of the State Geocadastre will be different, given the determined procedural status of the State Geocadastre in a specific court case. In the article, the authors, based on the legislation, define their vision of the rules for the involvement of the State Geocadastre in the consideration of land disputes, which allows to determine uniform rules for determining the scope of procedural legal personality of the State Geocadastre in courts in accordance with the provisions of the legislation of Ukraine. In addition, the authors formulate proposals for improving the legislation in this part.