However, governments everywhere tend to forget that the right of every citizen to their own property is also a Human Right, internationally protected by international and European conventions. For this reason, the International Union of Real Estate Owners (U.I.P.I.) at the suggestion of the President, Mrs. Stratos Paradia, has established since 2005 that December 10th be celebrated by all real estate owners’ organizations as “World Property Day”.
Our country, although it belongs to those that generally respect human rights, unfortunately still occupies one of the first positions in condemnations for violations of the right to property by the Strasbourg European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Today the right to property is the one that receives the most violations in Greece, mainly through the selective and excessive taxation of private real estate which affects its “core” and is an insult to it as a “human right”, protected by the Constitution . Besides, as has been established by the well-known report of the “Citizen’s Advocate”, violations of the Right to Property in our country “is a major social problem that concerns thousands of land owners, given that the Greek government and local authorities seize properties, without to compensate, even for decades, with time-honored city plans, antiquities protection, environmental protection and the execution of public works, which entail expropriation, deprivation or substantial restrictions on their property without payment of legal compensation or without timely payment of compensation.”
Today these violations continue unabated in our country with the overtaxation of private real estate with double ENFIA without a limit to the additional tax and without any correlation with the real income of the citizens , with the imposition of an unfair tax of 22% on those who do not carry out electronic transactions, in the form of the confiscation of hundreds of thousands of properties claimed en masse by the State through its “presumptive ownership” in the process of sanctioning forest maps and the National Cadastre, the uncontrolled and endless sequestration of thousands of properties by local authorities throughout the country for the alleged execution of projects, by the forestry, archaeological and other State services, often without reason and always without mercy, without any respect for this important human right…
