Limited Proprietary Rights to Land in Russian Civil Law

The types of land rights currently available in Russian civil law do not correspond to the new needs of society, being remnants of the socialist past. This results in a huge amount of land being in public ownership and the profitability of using it is low. The legislator has in the last decades sought to simplify the situation by reducing all land rights to two categories - ownership and tenancy. Clearly, this is not sufficient to formalize the full range of economic relationships associated with land use. Therefore, the Russian legislator is currently facing a serious problem of developing new legal forms of land use. In 2008, the reform of the law of property was initiated. In 2009, the Presidential Council for the Codification and Improvement of Civil Legislation adopted the Concept. On the basis of this Concept, a draft law has been drawn up which envisages a step-by-step introduction of changes to the Civil Code of the Russian Federation. The bill proposes a modernized version of the system of rights in rem containing a more extensive list of rights to other lands. It should be noted that, to date, the section on rights in rem is the only section that has not been adopted. In this paper, the author analyses the main provisions proposed by the bill and concludes that, despite some doctrinal contradictions, this is the only way to make a meaningful difference at this time.