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Socio-legal instabilities in Ukraine’s wartime Compensation Law for damaged and destroyed residential property

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 September 2024

Jon Unruh Open the ORCID record for Jon Unruh [Opens in a new window]
Jon Unruh*
Affiliation:
Department of Geography, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
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Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Laws seeking to resolve war-related problems face a significant dilemma. While the legal establishment in a war-affected country drafts laws based on normative approaches suited to peacetime and stable settings, the civilian population pursues crises livelihoods that are markedly unsuited to compliance with or use of such laws. What emerges are socio-legal instabilities that aggravate instead of resolve wartime problems. With a socio-legal examination of Ukraine’s wartime housing Compensation Law, this article describes six sets of instabilities that compromise the utility of the law and aggravate or create additional problems: (1) the case-by-case approach, (2) administrative and institutional capacities, (3) legal vs. available evidence, (4) the timeframe for claims submission and awareness raising, (5) excluded segments of civil society and (6) prohibitions on selling properties. Approaches from international best practice that may be able to attend to these instabilities are then suggested.

Keywords

socio-legalgeographyhousing Compensation LawUkrainewar recovery law
Type
Article
Information
International Journal of Law in Context , Volume 20 , Special Issue 4: Property in the Sharing Economy: Paradox, Disruption, and Institutional Design , December 2024 , pp. 581 - 597
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press

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