Neutral Hands: The Judicial Sequestration of Disputed Dominican Property

Some property disputes have a problem more urgent than who is right: who holds the asset while the question is decided. The co-heir occupying the estate’s best property and collecting its rents through years of partition litigation; the contested company premises run by one faction; the building whose disputed owner is letting it decay or bleeding its income. Possession during litigation is power, and the party enjoying it has every incentive to make the litigation long.

The judicial sequestration (secuestro) is the court’s tool for neutralizing that power: the disputed property is placed in the hands of a neutral administrator, the sequestrario, who conserves it, administers it and accounts for its fruits while the underlying case runs, so that the eventual winner receives an asset and not a ruin, and so that the litigation’s outcome is not prejudged by years of unilateral control. Over registered real estate, the measure is inscribed at the Title Registry, publicizing the property’s judicially administered status to anyone who might deal with it.

Requesting a sequestration is strategic surgery, not reflex. Courts weigh it as the serious intervention it is, displacing possession before judgment, and the requesting party should arrive with what the measure genuinely requires: a real dispute over the asset, concrete risk in leaving it where it sits, and a workable administration proposal, because a badly designed sequestration replaces one problem with another. The choice of sequestrario, the scope of their powers, their remuneration and their reporting are the measure’s real architecture, and litigators who treat them as afterthoughts inherit the consequences.

Resisting one is equally professional work: challenging necessity and proportionality, proposing less invasive alternatives, and, where the measure is granted, policing the administration it installs. And like every provisional measure in this series, the sequestration’s ending has its own procedure: the lifting, covered in its companion article, when the dispute resolves.

The framework is the Civil Code and Civil Procedure Code together with Law 108-05. Arthur & Castillo requests, resists and administers judicial sequestrations inside property and succession litigation. When the fight is over an asset, protecting the asset is part of winning the fight.

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Disclaimer: This publication is not intended to provide advice or suggest a guaranteed outcome as individual situations will differ and the situation may have changed since publication. For specific advice on the information provided and related topics, please contact the author.

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