Effective Accomplishment of Activities

Created
08.07.2020
By
IRN Project Team
Photo of the word "Land Registry" by Jonathan Rolande at Pixabay

In recent months, a successful transfer of knowledge has been taking place from the former countries (Austria and Estonia) to the new participants (Portugal, Spain, Hungary and Latvia) in the project LRI MS Connection 2. With a periodicity of about three weeks webinars have been held by web-based communication and collaboration tools, establishing a network of information sharing between the project partners.

Within the current activity of business analysis, the dissemination of knowledge has been contributing to problem solving in the first three areas under investigation. The first area under analysis was defining of user groups and user roles. The second area of focus covered the possible means of authentication and authorisation of those users mapped previously. The third area of analysis was centred on the search criteria for immovables in the national land registers.

In parallel, the activity also required an in-depth analysis of the land registers’ frameworks at national level. This was necessary for comparing the current specifications with the requirements of the European land registers’ interconnection system (LRI) at the e-Justice Portal, and for establishing an access point for sending and receiving the inquiries for information in the national land registers.

Therefore, the attention was also placed on describing and documenting of the present land registry organization, providing of the answers to the questions concerned with the communication between the information systems and on diagnosing possible issues of concern on the compliance with the national legal and technical matters.

As the analysis of complex systems by itself would raise several challenges under normal circumstances, the current exceptional situation caused by the virus SARS-CoV2 pandemic has imposed additional restrictions on the project partners. Nevertheless the high commitment of the project partners has become evident by the effective progress on the project activities and the use of creative skills on remote working in the effort to accomplish the stated project goals in time.

 

Classification of user groups and necessary user roles

In view of the legal basis for consulting the land registry information, namely whether it is widely public or bears restrictive access it is possible to derive the primary aspects regarding the users of land registry data. There is a wide range of user groups from users with complete anonymity to the users who are subject to rigorous and secure identity validation, which in most cases means determining of a person’s professional rights.

Other aspects that must be also investigated are the existence of specific legal determinants, such as particular rules for payments, special search fields or reasons for access to the information. More specifically, exceptions from the general practise may arise in case of specific user groups. For instance, user groups of judges or prosecutors, who hold special powers in criminal investigation within the scope of their duties.

Finally, the purposes of access to information was to be investigated as well. There are various reasons for data access, which may be associated with the specific groups of professionals like the registrars. For example, in Portugal, the solicitors may need to access data in the land registers to identify certain immovable assets for a seizure.

 

Authentication and Authorization

After the identification of user groups, having the unidentified citizens in the one end and highly specialised professionals in the other, it was the time to determine the legitimate interests and to describe the methods of user authentication and authorisation.

The purpose of the authentication is to verify that a person is the one he or she claims to be. The purpose of authorisation is to determine if the person has indeed legitimate interests and permission to access the land register data.

Nowadays, in connection with the large-scale deployment of public services on the Internet, most of the participating countries have adopted measures of electronic authentication. Moreover, the eIDAS regulation ensures that citizens can use their own national electronic identification schemes to access public services in the other EU member states.

Besides the citizens and private legal practitioners, it is also fundamental to understand how the access control is implemented in case of various civil servants are accessing the data in the national land registers. As well as to determine, in which cases the access can be granted or will be denied between different public organisations.

 

Criteria for Search Forms

After the last webinar on June 29th, the attention in the business analysis has been placed on the identification of the data the users would enter in the search forms, when looking for any specific data about the immovable properties.

Among other issues it would be essential to link the data fields used at national level with the search criteria available in the LRI forms at the e-Justice Portal. At the same time, bearing in mind the legal conditions and restrictions, which might create some differences in the list of existing mandatory or optional search fields, or perhaps reveal fields to be disabled altogether.