Supreme Court decision raises need for land registration courts

The Supreme Court’s recent decision on Manotok v. Barque  has disturbed several principles in property law and highlights the urgency of creating a special land registration court to address the special needs of property owners all over the country, according to an official of the Land Registration Authority (LRA).

Lawyer Jose Mamerto B. Cabatu, chief of the LRA Reconstitution Division, said the Manotok case has raised many questions in property law that will likely be repeated in several regional trial courts in many parts of the country because there are 23 friar estates similar to the Manotok case.

Cabatu said land registration courts can help solve such problems, deter land grabbing and even reduce corruption from property cases.

“Creating courts of land registration is not new because that was also provided in Philippine Commission Act No. 496, or the Land Registration Law,” Cabatu said, explaining that the powers of the country’s sole court of land registration was later transferred to courts of first instance, or today’s regional trial courts.

Reconstitution cases

“Regional courts of land registration will not only hasten adjudication of land disputes, but also limit the number of judges who handle judicial reconstitution cases,” Cabatu said.

“The LRA has been undertaking a computerization program that is meant to solve many problems in land registration, but it will probably take some time before we perfect the system because we are still trying to fix the bugs that we found since we started in 2011,” Cabatu said.

The issuance of certifications and verifications has been reduced substantially to five days and other transactions, involving chattel mortgages and personal properties, have also been hastened despite some snags the LRA experienced in its computerization.

“The problem with any computerized system is that when you put garbage in, you will get garbage out,” the lawyer said. “That is particularly true in several cases of judicial reconstitution.”

No choice but to comply

This is because there are several judicial reconstitution cases that were obviously decided erroneously, but the LRA had to comply with the decision of the court despite the evident errors.

“For instance, a Quezon City court recently titled a piece of property that was right in the middle of the National Government Center on Commonwealth Avenue. That is quite impossible because that used to be undivided land, owned by former Speaker Amang Rodriguez and was supposedly used to settle a tax case,” he said.

He also noted several different cases where the LRA had no choice but comply with questionable inferior and superior court orders, including the Manotok case.

The Manotok case involves only one of the 1,305 lots of the friar land called Piedad Estate in Quezon City and deals with only 34 hectares. Some of the original lots in the Piedad Estate are even larger and may have been subdivided several times in the past.

“If you consider the hectarage involved, that means Piedad alone may already affect thousands of property owners. What more the other Friar Estates? And there are 23,” Cabatu said.