On May 11 and 25, and June 8, 2024, the USAID Rule of Law Program (Program), through its rule of law hubs in Batumi, Kutaisi and Akhaltsikhe, trained 70 lawyers from the Adjara, Imereti and Samtskhe-Javakheti regions.

These lawyers belonged to the Georgian Bar Association (GBA) and the Legal Aid Service of Georgia (LAS). The training addressed land registration issues and included legal analysis of both systematic and sporadic real estate rights registration.

Levan Saneblidze, Head of the Monitoring Service of the Internal Control Division at the National Agency of Public Registry, led the training.

He spoke with the lawyers about the registration of ownership rights for legally possessed land plots, the recognition of ownership rights to arbitrarily occupied land, and the legal proceedings for land registration when parties fail to reach an agreement.

Mr. Saneblidze discussed deadlines for registration proceedings within systematic registration, identifying land plots, establishing solid boundary lines, refusing to recognize ownership rights to arbitrarily occupied land, and changing decisions made by the recognition commission. He also addressed the roles of the National Agency of Public Registry and the municipalities in this process.

The training also covered legal aspects of limiting ownership rights to agricultural land, the registration of foreigners' ownership rights to such land, and the cases decided by the Constitutional Court of Georgia that addressed these issues.

The concluding part of the training examined property rights as described and interpreted under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and reviewed the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, including cases on the deprivation of ownership rights to real estate (expropriation).