After two years of legal battle, the Supreme Court of Bosnia’s Republika Srpska (RS) entity corrected the injustice against the parties who were declared usurpers in the process of exhibiting immovable property in that entity only on the basis of the statement of the attorney general. Pročitaj više

In this way, a significant part of the property of Bosniaks in the RS was simply rebooked and the RS entity was registered as the owner, MINA news agency reported.

The Supreme Court verdict of December 4, 2023, in the administrative dispute following the lawsuit filed by Safet Ahmetovic from Switzerland against the RS Administration for Geodetic Affairs and Property Legal Affairs in Banja Luka, upheld the lawsuit and annulled the disputed act, i.e. the earlier verdict of the Istocno Sarajevo District Court.

“This means a lot for all returnees to the RS, because, conducting this procedure, I noticed that without sufficient evidence and facts, the RS is registered as the owner of certain property, and the parties are declared usurpers. This happens only on the basis of the statement of the ombudsman, which we emphasized in various procedures. I must say that there were many complaints and lawsuits, and this fight of ours has been going on for two years, and we are finally witnessing a positive decision of the Supreme Court of the RS that eliminated this irregularity,” lawyer Emir Kovacevic, who represented Ahmetovic in the aforementioned dispute, told the MINA Agency.

It is also important to mention that the RS Supreme Court concluded that the entry in the cadastral apparatus that corresponds to the actual state and the last possession of the immovable property in the presentation procedure has priority over the entry in the land register.

“In practice, what used to happen is that, if the commission, during the presentation of the real estate, found traces, somewhere from the 50s, 60s, that it was some national property, those plots were immediately registered to the RS without further determination of the facts and without any procedure. In this sense, the party would be declared a usurper of its own property, regardless of the fact that they have been using these properties and plots for many years as if they had inherited them from their ancestors”, Kovacevic explained.

According to the example of the mentioned case, this is an opportunity for all other parties who were similarly found to have been usurped, and RS registered as the owner of their immovable property, to request a repetition of the procedure, after which the factual situation will be established.

The proposal for repeating the procedure is submitted to the competent authority that made the first-instance decision within a subjective time limit of 30 days, while the objective time limit is five years.