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Explained: How the General Directorate of Cadastral Affairs Stores Documents

24-01-2023/in Analysis & Features, HLP /by Rand Shamaa

In the General Directorate of Cadastral Affairs (GDCA), the Central Land Registry Department and the Information Department are responsible for preserving and archiving various real estate documents to organise tasks and prepare for emergencies. Those documents include papers, photographs and electronic files. The aim is to protect the documents to prevent damage and loss of rights.

The mechanisms in place for documentation and archiving ensure the preservation of real estate documents, even if paper files are damaged. Previously, the general directorate would periodically photograph and store real estate documents stored at various sub-directorates in the governorates using digital cameras and microfilm, according to an undated study called Syrian Real Estate Legislation: Prospects and Challenges. The current general director of the GDCA and the director of the real estate legalisation prepared the report. There are subsidiary storage facilities in the governorates and a central facility in Damascus dedicated to storing these copies.

Another set of copies of the microfilm images is also stored at the Central Bank of Syria, according to a statement by the cadastral affairs general director in September 2022.

If true, this means there is a vast archive of real estate documents in Syria’s governorates.

However, the general directorate appears to have not fully lived up to its tasks. For example, a project that began in the 1990s to digitise the Land Registry, which was part of a larger strategic digital governance project, did not meet much success.

Only around 11 percent of Land Records in Syria have so far been digitised, which includes transferring these records from paper documents into electronic files. In 2014, the then-director of cadastral affairs stated that the digitisation project had reached a stumbling block, despite having direct impacts on real estate rights and the exchange of individuals’ and the state’s fixed assets. This was due, he said, to a lack of realistic and systematic planning and a failure to develop new work tools or update outdated technical concepts.

On the other hand, if the general directorate was fully meeting its duties, there would be no need, for example, to issue new laws such as Law No. 33 of 2017, which regulates the restoration of lost or damaged real estate documents. The law defines restoration as a set of administrative and judicial procedures ending in issuing an approved replacement for a real estate document or completing a missing or damaged portion.

There are two paths for document restoration under Law No. 33, administrative and judicial. Administrative restoration is when the General Directorate of Cadastral Affairs or another government entity has sufficient documents to restore their lost ones. Judicial restoration is applied if pictures of copies of those documents are not available or if there are insufficient documents. In such cases, a judge appointed by the Minister of Justice issues a decision specifying the nature of the damaged land records and any other components needing restoration. The concerned parties then have six months to provide documents supporting the real estate rights recorded on those land records.

If the General Directorate of Cadastral Affairs had a complete backup copy of those real estate registries, as officials claim, then there would be no need for judicial restoration. Indeed, despite this claim, the directorate acknowledges that its central archive is incomplete or outdated and that it must restore certain documents.

Explained: General Directorate of Cadastral Affairs

17-01-2023/in Analysis & Features, HLP /by Rand Shamaa

From the 16th century until the end of Ottoman rule in Syria, the Sharia courts regulated the documentation for proving real estate ownership and entered them into their records. These records are still preserved in Damascus and Aleppo, and to a lesser degree in Homs and Hama, and are still used before the Sharia courts today.

The modern system of land registration and administration in Syria began with the issuance of the Ottoman Tabu land registry system in 1859, which remained in force until 1918. Meanwhile, the current real estate system, with its institutions and laws, began only with the French mandate of Syria and Lebanon. The French High Commissioner issued four decrees based on French, German and Swiss laws in order to reform the real estate system in Syria and Lebanon:

Decree No. 186 of 1926, which included the system for real estate delimitation and census; Decree No. 187 of 1926, which identified the mechanisms for delimitation and census; Decree No. 188 of 1926, which included the Land Registry Law; and Decree No. 189 of 1926, which carried the executive instructions for the Land Registry Law.

This is how the modern Syrian state’s Land Registry came to be. Decree No. 188 of 1926 defined the Land Registry as a set of documents containing the descriptions and legal statuses of each piece of real estate, as well as the rights attached to them and any transactions or modifications. Under this decree, the registry consists of an ownership registry book and its supplementary documents, namely: daily book, a delimitation and census record, survey maps, aerial plans, survey plans and any other attached documents.

For Syrians, the term “Land Registry” refers to the place where real estate transactions and other related items are documented. As for the official name of the institution, it is called the General Directorate of Cadastral Affairs (GDCA), and is headquartered in Damascus with sub-departments in each governorate.

The legal and administrative structure of the GDCA has developed over time to meet changing documentation and registry needs. That said, the four decrees issued in 1926, during the French mandate, still exist today, alongside their amendments.

Legislative Decree No. 81 of 1947 regulates the operations and staffing of the GDCA and stipulates opening central and subsidiary departments in the governorates. The GDCA was attached to the Ministry of Justice until 1959, when it was switched over to the Ministry of Agrarian Reform. Finally, Local Administration Law No. 7 of 2010 attached the GDCA to the Ministry of Local Administration.

Originally, there were five central departments to the General Directorate of Cadastral Affairs under Law No. 81: the Administrative Diwan, the Inspection Commission, the Land Registration Department, the Real Estate Survey and Improvement Department, and the Accounting Department.

The number of departments increased over time, and their names and some of their duties changed, as the methods for preserving and archiving real estate documents developed from paper to photography, to digital. Today there are nine central departments: Real Estate Legalisation and Registration; Surveying; Administrative Affairs; Accounting; Central Land Registry; Information; Rehabilitation and Planning; Engineering and Transport; and Internal Monitoring.

Explained: Online Real Estate Services

06-12-2022/in Analysis & Features, HLP /by Rand Shamaa

The General Directorate of Cadastral Affairs opened the Central Specialised Citizens Real Estate Service Centre in April 2021, inside its headquarters in Damascus city. The directorate also announced that it will open similar centres in the other governorates to facilitate real estate service provisions to citizens.

According to a video published by the state-owned news outlet SANA in August 2022, the Damascus centre includes: 18 service windows, two offices for an alphabetically-organised index and survey data, three collection offices, an informational office, a communications office, an office for supervising follow-up, a technical support office, a financial compliance office, and five Industrial Bank offices to allow direct payment of fees.

The centre offers real estate services for the Damascus and Rural Damascus governorates. Those services include automated real estate registration, survey statements for automated real estate properties, proof or rejection of ownership, and a real estate registry statement that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs can approve. For similar services in other governorates, the Damascus centre communicates electronically with relevant cadastral affairs directorates to obtain the abovementioned documents. In all cases, the services provided only extend to properties located within areas where registration has been automated.

This work – albeit still modest – is the culmination of years of effort to automate certain processes in the General Directorate of Cadastral Affairs as part of an e-government plan launched two decades ago alongside the UNDP. According to the program, 100 percent of Syria’s main government services should now be available electronically. However, for various reasons, including the past decade of war, little progress has been made toward that goal.

The Syria Report asked several lawyers in Damascus who specialise in real estate how much they now benefit from online services at the centre. They all responded that they had never entered the centre despite working near-daily in the General Directorate of Cadastral Affairs headquarters. Instead, they preferred to work traditionally, coordinating directly with Cadastral Affairs employees to obtain real estate documents for the clients in exchange for paying widely known bribes. It is customary for the attorney to bear these additional expenses.

Citizen service centres

The General Directorate of Cadastral Affairs had previously begun providing online real estate services in coordination with the governorates’ citizen service centres. For example, the citizen service centres in Damascus governorate offered real estate services, including registering residential lease contracts, certified copies of lease contracts, and temporary registration. Temporary registration includes a statement showing the series of owners for a property, an ownership statement drawn from the alphabetical index, a real estate registry request, a real estate compliance registry and a certified copy of the title deed. The citizen service centres in Damascus also provide some real estate services to other governorates, such as real estate registry extraction, description statement, series of owners, survey statements, survey plans, subdivision plans and ownership statements from the alphabetical index.

Automating work in Cadastral Affairs directorates

Providing these real estate services was impossible until a necessary infrastructure was set up, including automating land registries in some governorates: Damascus, Rural Damascus, Hama, Lattakia, Tartous and Suweida. Certain electronic equipment and software were also installed. The Cadastral Affairs directores in different governorates were also linked to the central directorate in Damascus and the service centres.

Digitising, or automating, land registries means transferring paper real estate records into digital records and electronically linking real estate services between the governorates. The goal is to protect and facilitate information handling, speed up real estate transactions, and ease citizens’ access to Cadastral Affairs services.

Recent years have seen several statements, reports and news items from the General Directorate of Cadastral Affairs about automating its records. Now and then, it would announce that it was automating the records for new real estate zones containing thousands of properties.

However, these achievements no longer appear realistic. What little has been achieved in recent years has been limited and inconsistent. For example, in 2017, the cadastral affairs directorate in Hama announced that it had finished installing an electronic real estate data exchange network – also known as a BDN – in the Masyaf, Salamiyeh, Mahardeh and Al-Suqaylabiyeh districts. At the same time, the directorate also announced that it was following up on a project to automate the land registry and that, as a first step, it had entered some 2,500 real estate properties in Hama. But the provision of electronic real estate services in Hama was delayed until February 2022. By that point, around 43,500 land records of a total 482,925 in Hama were digitised, or only about 10 percent. Completion rates in other governorates are around the same or even less.

Still, in early 2018, the General Directorate of Cadastral Affairs stated that it was following up on work to digitise records in Damascus, Rural Damascus, Tartous, Lattakia, Homs, Hama and Suweida, with a total of 25 real estate zones and two zoned areas in Damascus having undergone the process. This number is paltry compared with Syria’s total 11,172 real estate zones. And amid a lack of statistics and slow-moving work on the national level, it is difficult to obtain precise numbers on the success rate so far. The official numbers available so far indicate that until the beginning of 2021, some 500,000 land records across Syria have been digitised out of a total of around six million, or around eight percent, are now digitised. More recently, in October 2022, the Minister of Local Administration announced that around 700,000 records had been digitised, raising that rate to 11 percent.

Cadastral Affairs has blamed these law numbers on numerous difficulties and obstacles, such as electricity shortages, fuel, staff at all employment levels and funding. For example, in 2018, only SYP 225 million were allocated to the directorate to follow up on the digitisation project.

In short, any electronic real estate services are limited to the land records that have already been digitised, which means that such services are only available for around 11 percent of all such records in Syria so far. It is also unclear how continued electricity and internet outages will impact such services.

Explained: Subdivision of Real Estate Properties

29-11-2022/in Analysis & Features, HLP /by Rand Shamaa

Ifraz, or subdivision, of real estate in Syria means dividing a real estate property into smaller parcels. The Directorate of Cadastral Affairs carries out the technical process following plans that the relevant local administrative unit has approved.

The subdivision process divides the original property into new properties, each with a unique number. It also considers the building code for the area if the original property was located within a zoning plan or the minimum surface area for agriculture if the property was originally agricultural land outside of a zoning plan.

One reason an owner may decide to subdivide their property is to divide it into parts to sell. In other cases, common property owners may wish to allocate a piece to each of them.

It is important to distinguish between the subdivision process and a similar process called real estate partitioning. The latter is a procedure where owners partition a piece of land into subplots to build buildings and public facilities on those subplots. The Planning and Urban Development Law No. 23 of 2015 delineates the methods and conditions for real estate division.

How is ifraz carried out?

Ifraz occurs through one of two methods. First, it can be done by mutual consent of the owners or through the order and permission of the property owner. Secondly, subdivision can also be carried out via court ruling after one or all common owners file a case for possession to divide the property amongst themselves.

For the subdivision to be implemented, the survey department of the relevant Land Registry, a part of the General Directorate of Cadastral Affairs, must complete a technical subdivision draft for the property. This draft contains technical plans that determine what the property will look like after subdivision, the property description, and boundary lines.

Additionally, this draft must comply with the building code in its real estate zone and the master and detailed zoning plans, according to the Ministry of Local Administration Circular No. 1/63/2/D of 2000.

Next, the relevant administrative unit must approve the technical subdivision draft for properties within the local zoning plan, according to a Ministry of Local Administration circular from 2011, based on the Local Administration Law in Legislative Decree No. 107 of 2011. Meanwhile, the local technical services directorate approves drafts for properties outside the zoning plan.

After that comes a series of different steps within the relevant land registry department: compiling a subdivision contract between the property owners that includes their approval of the technical subdivision draft; registration of that contract in the real estate documentation office; confirmation of the contract in the survey department; then entering into the registration division which creates new land records for the properties resulting from the subdivision process.

Conditions for subdivision

The subdivision process may only be carried out for properties that have final ownership, meaning that for subdivision to occur, full ownership must already be in place, and there may not be any lawsuits in the land record for that property.

Agricultural lands outside of zoning plans may not undergo subdivision if less than 4,000 square metres, per the Ministry of Agriculture Circular No. 1308/B of 1984.

The older Municipalities Law No. 172 of 1956 stated that lands could not be subdivided, partitioned, or zoned into multiple building plots within the borders of a municipality without a draft first approved by the local mayor. This is mainly because, in some cases of termination of common property, the property’s subdivision can result in shares whose surface area is below the permissible limit for constructing any buildings. Such shares then remain unusable. This is why the Minister of Justice issued Communique No. 43 of 1962 to the courts, which affirmed that in cases of common property termination, subdivision drafts must be presented to mayors for approval to comply with building codes before a court rules on the subdivision.

Meanwhile, in State Council jurisprudence No. 149 of 1963, Cadastral Affairs was obligated to register subdivisions issued by final court rulings, even if they violated building codes. If Cadastral Affairs files a claim objecting to the subdivision ruling, the case may be exempted from this judicial process per the Procedural Code.

Explained: Expropriating Properties That Haven’t Undergone Delimitation and Census

29-11-2022/in Analysis & Features, HLP /by Rand Shamaa

Article 10 of Expropriation Law No. 20 of 1983 allows for the expropriation of lands that have not undergone delimitation and census – that is, real estate with no Land Record. For this to occur, from the outset, only the lands included in the expropriation must undergo delimitation and census. However, the expropriating party may also take possession of a property before this process.

The government delineated the delimitation and census process in Decree No. 186 of 1926, which concerns lands that still need to be included in the Land Registry. The process results in establishing a Land Record for real estate in a given area, assigning them property numbers, and submitting the owners’ names to Cadastral Affairs.

Council of Ministers Communique, issued in 1982, defines the procedures for expropriating real estate in areas that have yet to undergo delimitation and census. The expropriating public entity must announce its expropriation decree via its main headquarters and in the public square of the village where the targeted land is located. This entity then must provide the relevant real estate department with a copy of the expropriation decree, alongside a request to launch delimitation and census work on the expropriated property.

A real estate judge must sign the delimitation and census work decision to proceed with the job at hand, after which the General Directorate of Cadastral Affairs and the expropriating entity are informed.

The Land Registry directorate tasks a survey team of specialised engineers, legal advisers, and other employees to carry out delimitation and census. The Land Registry’s delimitation and census office opens a dedicated register for the targeted properties to record the entire process and submit the final plans and survey records to the Land Registry’s secretariat.

The Directorate of State Properties, which is part of the Ministry of Agriculture, must also be represented as the survey team does its work so that it can provide any information or documents related to its rights and register any of its own objections. This right does not extend to the owner of the expropriated property. The Directorate of State Properties is in charge of inventorying, managing, and investing state-owned properties and opening and regulating registrations on that governorate’s real estate and public properties. The directorate also regulates the disposal, transfer of ownership, and registration of state-owned properties.

Once the work of delimitation and census is complete, the dossiers for the expropriated properties are submitted to the delimitation and census office for technical and legal review. The office then notifies the real estate judge of any deficiencies that must be resolved. The dossiers include survey and location plans for the property and notes on delimitation and census, such as a description of the property, its location, legal type, boundaries, owners’ names, any objections to those boundaries, and any other documents and papers provided by various parties.

The real estate judge announces when delimitation and census work has been completed, informs the relevant authorities, and sets a 10-day deadline for any objections. Only public entities may submit complaints, with owners and other rights holders excluded. In the eyes of the law, the property has become expropriated and is no longer privately owned. For objections to delimitation and census of properties that have not been expropriated, the deadline is 30 days.

Following the deadline for expropriated properties, the real estate judge announces their final decision and begins to read through the objections.

Relevant authorities must be notified of the final decision, and a copy of the decision must be posted to the door of the Real Estate Court. It does not need to be published in the Official Gazette. Afterwards, the decision is approved and sent directly to the secretariat of Cadastral Affairs to undergo any necessary procedures.

The owner of the expropriated property is excluded from these procedures. They also are not represented during this process even though the property has not yet been registered in the name of the expropriating entity. Though the owner should be allowed to intervene and present objections during delimitation and census, jurisprudence No. 325/326 of 1982 of the Supreme Administrative Court affirms that such owners are barred from this right. The court argues that this is because owners of exropriated properties have no relation to the delimitation and census process, which does not deprive them of their right to collect compensation on a set date.

Furthermore, expropriation allowances are not handed over to the expropriated property owners until after the delimitation and census procedure is complete, according to State Council Opinion No. 14 of 1973. This process can take years, negatively impacting the owner by barring them from their right to object and delaying their compensation.