Preventive control of legality
1. Do Land Registrars or Land Registries carry out a legal scrutiny or assessment of the documents or applications submitted or (conversely) are registered without a previous examination?
Land Registrars assess, under their responsibility, the legality of the extrinsic characteristics of deeds and notations submitted for registration.
2. What does the object of the LR assessment consist of? Are the documents presented and the content of the registration books or land books (or any other books or lists of your LR organisation) the only elements that land registrars bear in mind for carrying out their assessment and then to accept registration or not? What is the situation in your LR system?
Registrars examine submitted documents, but don’t compare them with the Landbook content.
3. Otherwise, the correct answer with respect to your LR assessment would be:
There are legally restricted cases of rejection or abeyance of applications of registration.
4. A specific case: let’s consider an application for registration based on a document or deed with lack of legal prerequisites. What would your LR response be?
When deeds or notations are lacking of legal requirements concerning their extrinsic and formal characteristics, that’s a reason of reject. In case the Registrar has doubts about the correspondence between the content of the deed and the typologies of deeds that can be transcribed according to the law, he can make, if requested by the parties, a temporary transcription valid for 30 days during which the interested parties can appeal to the court in order to get a final decision about the possibility of transcription. If the parties don’t go to the judge, the transcription or inscription becomes invalid from the beginning.
5. In case of rejection or abeyance of a document, does your system provide legal possibilities to request a review to the parties or stakeholders? Do they have legal possibilities of appealing the Land registers’ decision? Please, describe the procedures if applicable.
In case of rejection of an application, Italian LR system does provide to the parties the possibility to appeal to the court. Related procedures are described in details by articles 2674, 2674 bis, 2888 of the civil code and articles 113, 113 bis 113 ter of the civil procedure code.
6. Must registrars or LR offices do their assessment within deadlines? If applicable, is it mandatory for registrars in charge or is it rather a guideline?
Land Registrar has to accept or refuse the application as soon as possible. This is mandatory because according to the law he can’t delay the registration.
