PENGARAH TANAH DAN GALIAN SELANGOR

On the court record

Illustrates how the courts supervise the exercise of statutory land-administration powers and enforce the procedural conditions the National Land Code attaches to challenges to land decisions.

The Pengarah Tanah dan Galian Selangor (the Director of Lands and Mines, Selangor) appears in this corpus as a State land authority, almost always as a respondent or defendant in disputes about the registration, alienation and administration of land in Selangor. The decisions turn substantially on the National Land Code. A recurring procedural question is the time within which an appeal against a decision of the land authority must be brought under section 418 of the Code, and whether an appeal was filed within the statutory period — a limit the courts have treated as jurisdictional. Other matters engage the indefeasibility of title and the correctness of dealings recorded on the register, including cases in which competing claims to the same parcel are litigated in suits heard together. The corpus also reaches strata-title questions under the Strata Titles Act, such as whether a particular parcel was intended to form common property, and it includes applications for leave to bring judicial review under Order 53 of the Rules of Court 2012 to challenge decisions of the land authority. Because the Director is characteristically joined together with a district land administrator or a private party asserting a competing interest, many decisions turn on the allocation of statutory functions between the State-level and district-level land authorities and on the correct respondent. The matters are decided principally in the High Court, with appeals reaching the Court of Appeal and occasional questions of principle before the Federal Court. Taken together, the decisions in which the Director of Lands and Mines is a party illustrate how the courts supervise the exercise of statutory land-administration powers, enforce the procedural conditions the Land Code attaches to challenges, and resolve disputes over title, registration and the boundary between common and individual property. Several of the reported matters also engage the mandatory procedural requirements attaching to an originating summons and the striking out of proceedings under Order 18 rule 19 of the Rules of Court 2012 where the party has not followed the correct process, so that the decisions address not only the substance of a land dispute but also the route by which a challenge to the land authority may properly be brought.