State Committee for Land and Cartography Eliminated

President Ilham Aliyev signed a decree on the elimination of the State Committee for Land and Cartography.

The functions of the liquidated Committee are divided between the State Committee on Property Issues, the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources and the State Border Service. This is on the website of the President of Azerbaijan.

When deciding, the President was guided by Paragraph 32 of Article 109 of the Constitution, in order to ensure uniform management in the regulation of property rights.

According to the decree, the State Committee on Property has been passed functions in the area of state land cadastre, land management, surveying, land market organization, state land registry, submission to the Presidential Administration of maps of municipalities in the electronic media and paper, as well as quarterly inquiries about changes that have occurred on land owned by the state, municipal and private property.

The Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources has been passed functions of land monitoring, restoration and improvement of soil fertility, geodesy, topography, cartography, gravimetry, delimitation of territorial units, geographic information systems of national importance, providing design, application and publishing general geographic, land, geobotanical, administrative, political and scientific information and other cross-sectoral thematic maps, atlases, textbooks maps, publication of accurate state topographic maps providing national decisions on defense, scientific research and other issues, as well as graphics, digital, photographic plans and plans of other forms. In addition, from now on the Ministry of Environment is imposed the safety and security in the implementation of geodetic, gravimetric, topographic and cartographic works and use of materials, large-scale series of single-purpose public systems of coordinates, elevation, gravity measurements, topographic maps and plans, implementation of metrological provision of geodetic and topographic maps.

The State Border Service will undertake, in conjunction with the Ministry of Environment, the delimitation and demarcation of state borders of Azerbaijan, including the boundary waters and Azerbaijan's sector of the Caspian Sea (lake).

The Cabinet of Ministers within two months is prescribed to prepare and submit proposals to the President of the country on issues emerging from the decree.

"Elimination of the State Committee once again actualized the question of reform," says the Chairman of the Association of Assistance to Economic Initiatives Azer Mehdiyev. "But reformatting of this issue in the complex form in the format of the reform package would be more correct. For example, in many countries, forestry, fisheries, and agriculture are within the purview of the Ministry of Agriculture. We have these functions distributed between the two ministries," he said.

The State Committee of Land (SCL) was established on July 17, 1992. In 2001, through the merger of the SCL and the State Committee for Geodesy and Cartography hte State Committee on Land and Cartography was established. Since 2004, its Chairman was Garib Mamedov.   -0--