Observaţii privind exproprierea pentru cauză de utilitate publică reglementată de Legea nr. 255/2010

Rezumat

Despite being an absolute right, the law may impose certain limitations on property rights. The boundaries of property rights can be established in the public interest or in the private interest.
Expropriation is the most severe limitation of private property rights established in the public interest, because it results in the loss of private property rights.
Law No. 33/1994 on expropriation for public utility is the general law on the subject, and its application has shown that it is incomplete and some of its provisions are unrealistic. These are the prerequisites for the adoption of the new regulation contained in Law No. 255/2010.
The key differences between the two regulations are as follows:
– the declaration of public utility by administrative act, for each individual work, and, implicitly, the possibility of contesting this declaration, has been abandoned;
– owners of immovable property and holders of other rights in rem can no longer make objections to the act by which the land is included in the expropriation corridor;
– the amount of compensation shall be estimated by the expropriator on the basis of an evaluation report, taking into account the expert reports commissioned by the chambers of notaries public, updated;
– the expropriator is obliged to record in the names of those expropriated the amounts of the estimated compensation;
– the situation of real estate belonging to the private domain of administrative territorial units is regulated;
– expropriation is no longer ordered by the court, but by administrative act issued by the expropriator;
– expropriation is not prevented by the fact that not all the owners of the property are known or by the fact that the right of ownership is disputed in court by more than one person, just as the lack of knowledge of the heirs of the owner of a property is not an impediment to this procedure;
– the effects of the expropriation decision cannot be suspended following a legal challenge;
– the law contains its own rules on how to deal with the land register issues involved in expropriation;
– the way in which claims challenging the act of compensation are dealt with is governed by confusing rules which do not take account of the right of those expropriated to receive fair compensation.
In our paper we tried to analyse all these issues and offer some solutions.
Keywords: property rights limits; public utility; real estate; expropriation; compensation.