Sending a question to the Government Electronic Information Portal, Mr. Truong Minh Tri said: In 2019, he received the transfer of 3,000 m2 of annual crop land. Now he wants to change the land use purpose of 500 m2.
The land plot has been granted a Certificate of Land Use Rights, when Mr. Tri received the transfer, there was a housing project built by the old owner on the land, and then he renovated this project because at that time the house's current condition had seriously deteriorated.
Now, when he submitted the application for land use purpose conversion, the Commune People's Committee requested him to pay an administrative fine for building works on agricultural land and to dismantle the works before carrying out procedures for land use purpose conversion.
But in fact, the land plot has been transferred through many people and then to Mr. Tri, and according to neighbors, the land plot was used before 2000, the house was also built a long time ago (before 2014 or earlier), but who built it cannot be determined because at that time the land user arbitrarily built and did not register or report to the local authorities, and also did not have any documents to prove what year the construction time was.
Mr. Tri asked, does his case fall under point a, clause 3, Article 139 of the Land Law? Is he required to prove himself that the house was built before 2014 to be eligible for dismantling when handling administrative violations? If so, how to prove it, can the testimony of neighbors be used as a basis for proving it?
Will you be administratively sanctioned? And do you have to return the illegal profits according to Article 10 of Decree No. 123/2024/ND-CP?
How can he carry out procedures to change the land use purpose or procedures to register ownership rights for this project?
The Ministry of Agriculture and Environment answers this issue as follows: Building houses on agricultural land is an act of violating land law, so the commune-level People's Committee's request for administrative handling of violations is in accordance with its assigned functions and tasks.
However, in order to handle situations arising from practice as he suggested, the Land Law has regulations on issuing Certificates of land use rights and ownership of assets attached to land for cases where households and individuals are using land without land use right documents but do not violate land law, and are not subject to cases where land is allocated not within their authority (Article 138) and resolving cases where households and individuals use land with violations of land law before July 1, 2014 (Article 139).
Therefore, please contact the Commune People's Committee for consideration and settlement according to their authority and legal regulations.
