Common Standards of Civil Procedure in the EU: Main Features and Perspectives

The aim of this article is to study the notion of “common minimum standards of the civil procedure” proposed by the European Parliament in Resolution of July 4, 2017 (2015/2084 (INL)) with recommendations to the Commission on common minimum standards of the civil procedure in the European Union. It allows a further development and convergence of the civil procedure in the EU and the world – in the light of the Project on European rules of the civil procedure of ELI-Unidroit, ALI-Unidroit Transnational Principles of Civil Procedure, and M. Storm’s Final Report “Approximation of Judiciary Law in the EU”. Trends in the convergence of the civil procedure and overcoming the differences existing in the national legislation of Member States are significant not only for the EU. The reform of the judiciary and civil procedure in Ukraine is aimed at increasing the level of protection of the rights and freedoms and the implementation of the European and worldwide standards of civil justice. The resolution adopted by European Parliament refers to common minimum standards for the civil procedure, and this is the first time when the term was proposed at the level of the EU law, although the approximation of the civil procedural law has been considered for quite a long time. Therefore, the article proposes approaches to the definition of these standards. The main task of the implementation of the common minimum standards of the civil procedure is to ensure the rights of the citizens by establishing minimum standards for the opening, preparation, and resolution of civil cases in the courts of the Member States, which will provide a really new stage in the harmonization of this branch of law and reflect the general desire of the community to define common approaches to the basic provisions of the civil procedure. Accordingly, the article focused on the study of the proposed common minimum standards of the civil procedure by comparing it with the Civil Procedure Code of Ukraine of 2017. Among them are the standards of providing funds, procedures, and measures for effective judicial protection, requirements for hearings, the use of temporary and other security measures, the efficiency of the procedure, the motivation of decisions, general principles of the case management, the order of providing evidence, involvement of experts, legal aid, as well as requirements to prevent abuse of funding by which a person goes to court. Also the approximation of the provisions on the procedure for the services of documents, the provision of the right to have a lawyer in a civil procedure, access to information, interpretation and translation of the documents, determination of the responsibilities of parties and their representatives, requirements for a public trial, ensuring independence, and impartiality of the judges.