The deadline for submitting the registration of illegal structures in the real estate register, which expired on February 14th, will be postponed by six months.
This is envisaged by amendments to the Law on Legalization of Illegal Buildings (Article 48), which is in the parliamentary procedure and has been included in the agenda of the extraordinary session scheduled for early February. An urgent procedure has been proposed for the adoption of the law.
The Law on the Legalization of Illegal Buildings officially entered into force on August 14th of last year.
"It is proposed to extend the deadline for initiating the procedure for registering an illegal building in the real estate cadastre, which is the obligation of the owner of an illegal building whose building is not registered in the real estate cadastre. Namely, due to the inconsistency of the provisions of the Law on State Survey and Cadastre with the provisions of the Law on Legalization, the preparation and verification of the survey study of the completed state of the illegal building by the Cadastre could not be carried out in a timely manner, and it was assessed as necessary to extend the deadline for initiating the registration procedure, that is, the preparation of the study with all the elements prescribed by law," it is written in the explanation of the draft law prepared by the Ministry of Spatial Planning, Urbanism and State Property.
In addition, amendments to Article 48 (deadline for registration in the real estate cadastre), as explained by this Ministry, were proposed with the aim of prescribing a procedure for determining the construction/existence of a facility in space even if it is not visible on a satellite image (e.g. the facility is surrounded by trees or other obstacles and cannot be identified on the image).
"So it is proposed that the owner of the facility can initiate a procedure to prove, with the mandatory finding of a construction expert, that the facility existed in the area before July 2025, and thus ensure the possibility of its legalization," the Ministry of Spatial Planning explained.
Article 50 of the Law is also being amended, extending the deadline for establishing records of illegal structures, which is an obligation of municipalities, from six to 18 months from the date the law enters into force.
"The deadline for implementing the procedure for selecting a geodetic organization to prepare a survey report of the completed state of an illegal facility is extended from 6 to 12 months from the date of entry into force of the law," it states in the explanation of the draft law.
An amendment to Article 9 was proposed, and the amendment was initiated by the Union of Municipalities of Montenegro, which proposed the abolition of the special minimum distance requirement for all buildings with an area of up to 500m2.
"The current legal solution stipulates that an illegal primary residence, a residential building with a net area of up to 200m2 and an auxiliary building that meets the requirements of Article 6 of this law, can be legalized provided that it is built at a distance of at least 1 m from the border of the neighboring cadastral plot, while for buildings over 200m2, the condition is that they must be at least 2 m from the border of the neighboring cadastral plot. It is stated that this condition can represent a blocking mechanism in the legalization process in situations where the owner of the neighboring plot refuses to give consent even though the building has existed on the ground for years or even decades, and that the position of illegally built buildings cannot be changed without significant technical and financial consequences," the explanation reads.
The Ministry further explains that, considering the proposal justified, especially from the perspective of the efficiency of the legalization process, it is proposed to delete this special condition, regardless of the surface area of the object that is in the legalization process.
"It has also been initiated to amend the Law to find a solution that will enable the continuation of the legalization procedure for facilities for which a request for legalization had already been submitted under the old law, and the same procedures were either terminated or the requests were rejected due to non-compliance with basic urban planning parameters (which was a condition for issuing a decision on legalization in accordance with the previous legal solution). The proposed amendment enables the legalization of facilities that can be identified on an orthophoto from 2018 and whose owners have not made any additions or upgrades to those facilities since that period," the explanation states.
An amendment to Article 13 has been proposed, which defines that the survey report of the completed state of an illegal building must also contain data on the distance of the building from the borders of the neighboring cadastral plot and the position of the building in relation to the regulation line.
"The above was met with disapproval from the geodetic profession, with the argument that for this information, when preparing the study, an expert from the architectural, planning or construction profession would have to be engaged, and that this data is not and could not be part of the geodetic studies because the regulation line is defined by the planning document. Considering the justification of the objection, it is proposed to delete the provision of this information from the study of the completed survey of the illegal structure," the Ministry stated.
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