Prague, Oct 11 (CTK) – The Czech State Land Office (SPU) will settle 95 percent of churches’ applications for the return of property by the end of the year, SPU Director Svatava Maradova said in the Questions of Vaclav Moravec on public Czech Television (CT) today.
She said the remaining 5 percent are either complicated cases in which the rightfulness of the claim had to be long assessed, or such where a big extent of property is involved.
According to the restitution law, which took effect in January 2013, churches are to be returned land and real estate worth 75 billion, stolen from them by the communist regime, and given 59 billion crowns plus inflation in financial compensation for unreturned property during the following 30 years. The Catholic Church will get 47.2 billion crowns of the total plus inflation.
The Supreme Audit Office (NKU) said in August the SPU did not settle 42 percent of applications by the legal deadline. But it said the half-year deadline is short. Representatives from some church communities said in the past the state works slowly and that it does not keep the law-embedded deadline.
Maradova said, however, no church has filed any complaint against the SPU. She said it cannot be ruled that no complaints will be filed next year, but that the office will try to settle a maximum of the applications by the year’s end.
Maradova said the SPU registers about 40 complaints against its verdicts. She said the number is not extreme given the total of decisions made.
The SPU is also involved in 90 actions that are not linked to the property settlement law of 2012, but to previous legislation. These are declaratory actions, Maradova said.
In them, property owned by municipalities for which a financial compensation is paid according to the law is involved.
With their complaints, however, the churches challenge the previous transfer of property from the state to another owner and they demand that the court declare that the property can be handed out, Maradova said.
However, the state assesses the ownership right, not the question of whether the land can be handed out, or not, she added.
($1=23.856 crowns)
