It seems that the most important purpose of the institution of the Land and Mortgage Register is the purpose of establishing the legal status of real estate, as defined in Article 1 of the Act regulating the functioning of the Register – the Act of 6 July 1982 on Land and Mortgage Registers and Mortgages. The existence of the Land and Mortgage Register is of fundamental importance for the security of real estate transactions. It protects the persons concerned from the negative consequences of the disloyalty of their counterparty.

In order to fulfil the main purpose of the regulation, the legislator decided to introduce such institutions as the warranty of public credibility and the principle of openness of the content of the Land and Mortgage Register. Any entry or application of which a note has been made benefits from the principle of openness of the land and mortgage register. The principle of publicity excludes the possibility of pleading before a court of ignorance of an event mentioned in the land and mortgage register. In order for this principle to apply in practice, a given piece of information of a legal nature, e.g. a claim to which a non-owner is entitled, must be disclosed, i.e. there must be an annotation in the ledger of the legally relevant information in question. The question arises whether every claim is subject to entry in the register.

Not all claims are subject to disclosure in the land and mortgage register. Pursuant to Article 16 of the Land and Mortgage Act, personal rights and claims may be disclosed in the land and mortgage register in cases indicated in statutory provisions, in addition to rights in rem. At the same time, paragraph 2 of the same article lists the specific claims that may be disclosed. As a consequence of the above, the question arises as to whether paragraph 2 contains an exhaustive catalogue of claims subject to disclosure or whether this matter may also be regulated by provisions of separate laws. Following the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court, it should be assumed that the phrase in cases indicated in statutory provisions, applying a grammatical and systemic interpretation, clearly indicates that the catalogue in paragraph 2 is not closed. For example, claims related to development projects regulated in the Law on Notaries will also be subject to disclosure in the land and mortgage register. There are no criteria limiting the legislator in creating the catalogue of claims disclosed in the land and mortgage register.

One of the guarantors of the security of real estate transactions is the institution of the warranty of public faith regulated in Article 5 of the Act on Land Registers and Mortgages. It provides a presumption of the truthfulness of the disclosed legal state of a real estate in the case of a conflict between the actual state and the one in the Land and Mortgage Register. In the literature on the subject, the question still remains highly doubtful – does the institution of the warranty of public credibility extend to the disclosure of claims in the Land and Mortgage Register? This question was answered in the affirmative by the Supreme Court in its judgment of 8^th February 2019 (I CSK 770/17).

In order to obtain an entry of one’s claims in the contents of the register, one must initiate the relevant land and mortgage register proceedings. In these proceedings, the court will consider the merits of our application and issue a ruling. It should be borne in mind that the court, when examining the issue of making an action related to updating the content of the Land and Mortgage Register, does not establish the factual state and does not examine whether the legal state after the entry is made will be consistent with the actual state; however, in accordance with the principle of legalism also applicable in these proceedings, it assesses whether the entry will be made in accordance with the law. The Supreme Court emphasised this point in its judgment of 12^th March 2020 (IV CSK 276/18). The court emphasised that in land and mortgage register proceedings, legal relations are not ruled on, only on the content of the land and mortgage register, and the entry is made on data demonstrated by a proper basis, which does not have to correspond to the actual legal state.