Problem

One of the significant sources of corruption in Ukraine in recent decades has been the free privatization of state and municipal land, which has been in place since the 1990s. The mechanism of such privatization is extremely flawed: it does not provide citizens with equal opportunities to exercise their rights guaranteed by law, and it causes unequal redistribution of land resources in both regional and human dimensions, which reduces the right of everyone to receive a free plot of land into their ownership to a mere declaration. Instead, the provisions on free privatization have been widely used by unscrupulous officials of government agencies and local self-government bodies that manage state and municipal land for the shadow redistribution of valuable state and municipal land.
Among the factors justifying the gradual phasing out of free land privatization or its transformation into other forms of state social support for the population, the following factors should be highlighted: social injustice; low level of transparency of the procedure due to minimal digitalization of the procedure, which makes it impossible to exercise proper public control and creates unlimited opportunities for corrupt manipulations during the free privatization procedure; the lack of a mechanism for obtaining information on the location of vacant land plots, which gives rise to corruption risks; the possibility that free privatization will be blocked by government agencies and local self-government bodies at any stage, which leaves the applicant virtually deprived of effective means of protecting his right to privatize the land plot; free privatization, which is a tool exploited by unscrupulous private developers. At the same time, it is impossible to completely abolish free privatization today, given the provisions of Article 22 of the Constitution of Ukraine, which requires finding optimal approaches to solving this problem.