The announcements that the temple of the Christ Survivor in Pristina will be demolished appeared again. Serbian Orthodox Church (SPC) does not intend to submit request for legalization to the Pristina institutions (the deadline is 11 June) because they already have legal documentation attained before 1999. For the churches which were built after 1999, SPC will submit requests to the competent ministry in Pristina.
In the same situation might be the owners of thousands of Serbian houses, which are not legalized, if owners don’t submit requests for the legalization. Technically, the issue about legalization is to register illegal buildings, which is free of charge, while formal requests with documentation will be submitted till the March next year. Only small number of Serbs submitted requests in the Registry of illegal building, which is accessible online. People are uninformed, many of them don’t know what will be expenses and many of them are afraid. There are premises which are the topics of the court disputes and nobody can submit request for that property.
It is expected that many problems will appear, because of the previous practice where Albanians falsified ownership. The expectations are also that double ownership and disputes will soon begin, particularly when several owners apply for the legalization of the same things.
“The whole problem about the Serbian property in Kosovo is very complex. The essential problem in Kosovo is usurpation of the Serbian property and Kosovo Property Agency still didn’t solve 40,000 requests for returning of the property to the Serbs,” said Ljubomir Maric, Kosovo Minister for administration. He added that in the first phase will be exchanged cadastral data and that it is important to finish the procedure till the end “because of possible abuses, as experienced previously.” He added that on-going adoption of the Law on verification is very disturbing, because it is contrary to the cadastral records.
