The state leadership announced the new legalisation procedure with great fanfare. Before the law was adopted, it was proclaimed that all owners of illegal buildings would become “masters in their own homes” as early as March 2026.
Then, someone within that same ruling establishment apparently realised that not all legalisation cases could be resolved automatically, so it was later announced that only the first certificates would be issued in March.
Naturally, the public needed to be dazzled with figures, so on 20 April this year, the line minister released a statement announcing that, at 4:29 p.m. that day, the jubilee 100,000th certificate had been issued.
This calculation is based on the figure presented by the President on 9 February this year, according to which nearly 2.5 million legalisation applications had been submitted by that date.
At that point, the question arose as to whether those certificates might have been issued at speed during the election campaign, from Kula in the north to Knjaževac in the south, and from Bajina Bašta in the west to Kladovo in the east of Serbia.
Refusal to provide information of public importance
Interested in this issue of vital importance to citizens, and encouraged by the fact that the new law stipulates that the “registration and recording of ownership rights” over illegal buildings is a matter of public interest for the Republic of Serbia, journalists began requesting information regarding the number of certificates issued by municipality, as well as the number of property registrations made in the cadastre on the basis of those certificates.
I am not aware that anyone has received that data, but it is known that these two institutions are rejecting requests on the grounds that “the data in question are not generated through their work”.
Is this merely a case of “buying time” while waiting for artificial intelligence to complete a task which the natural intelligence of employees in the services dealing with legalisation failed to complete during the previous ten years of the (non-)implementation of the Law on Legalisation? Presumably, we shall soon be informed how many proceedings concerning the concealment of information of public importance have been initiated before the Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection.
We shall also find out whether the Agency for Spatial Planning and Urbanism of the Republic of Serbia (the Agency), which issues the certificates, as well as the Republic Geodetic Authority (RGZ), which registers properties in the cadastre on the basis of those certificates, will continue to ignore the Commissioner’s orders to disclose this information of public importance, once again citing the most absurd reasons.
Have 100,000 legalisation certificates really been issued?
Neither the Agency nor the competent ministry has so far presented Serbian citizens with a valid report on the number of certificates issued, although such a report would necessarily have to contain data on the number of certificates issued to date by the cadastral municipality.
Such a report certainly exists, because it is inconceivable that the Office of the President of Serbia has not requested it by now. Likewise, the Ministry of Finance has not informed the public how much revenue the budget has so far generated from legalisation fees.
As a result, we are left to assume that the competent ministry had hoped artificial intelligence would promptly produce those 100,000 certificates, but that the software may meanwhile have glitched.
The alternative is that the certificates really have been issued, but that the information is being concealed because of questionable priorities in resolving cases. It remains to be seen which of these two reasons explains the absence of public boasting about the number of citizens who have so far become “masters in their own homes”.
The simplest cases have been resolved
In any case, regardless of how many certificates have been issued so far, it is certain that these concern the simplest procedures. These are cases in which the application was submitted by the sole owner of the plot, who, under the law, was not required to submit any documentation proving ownership, the size of the property, or the construction date of the illegal building.
It is possible that artificial intelligence estimated there to be around 100,000 such properties, so the competent ministry released that figure “on credit”, due to the impatience of the political leadership to boast of impressive numbers before the public.
The remaining applications will be far more difficult to resolve and, as things stand, this process is likely to drag on for years. Work on those applications will involve verification of ownership documentation and/or geodetic survey reports, and most likely the supplementation of documentation that was submitted incompetently by postal workers and citizens, and often by municipal employees as well. None of those persons possesses the expertise required to assess which documentation is necessary to prove ownership rights.
(Danas, 18.05.2026)
https://www.danas.rs/vesti/ekonomija/gde-se-to-zaglavila-legalizacija/
