State liability and uncertainty perception on cadastral parcel area registry in Turkey

This article investigates the relationship among the spatial uncertainty in the cadastral maps, the registered parcel areas, and the state liability in the context of ownership rights in Turkey. Throughout the history of the General Directorate of Land Registry and Cadastre (GDLRC), several regulations have been put into effect for defining the state’s responsibility regarding the geometric errors sourced from surveying and map production activities, from raw measurements to the calculated parcel areas. The errors may be sourced from instrument precision, manufacturing flaws, algorithms used for coordinate determination from measurements, projection system transformations, parcel area calculation methods, and operator mistakes, which may arise from insufficient training, human nature, or even intentional acts. Recently in Turkey, several court decisions were ruled on the state liability and indemnity for the differences between the “actual boundary” and “registered area” of cadastral parcels, without considering the various types of uncertainty, such as random, systematic, and gross errors sourced from the instruments and methods. The present study aimed at analyzing the insufficiently considered relation between the measurement uncertainty and the legal bindings by investigating the Turkish Land Registry and Cadastre System comparatively with the Swiss one, with attention to the recent court decisions including the one from European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Possibilities for future exercises are also discussed here.