Taking of Evidence in the New Hungarian Code of Civil Procedure
Taking of Evidence in the New Hungarian Code of Civil Procedure

Summary/Abstract: Act no. III of 1952 on the Code of Civil Procedure (hereinafter referred to as CCP) provides a legal framework for 200 to 230 thousand civil proceedings a year, and it constitutes a legislative background for more than one million non-litigious proceedings a year, thus the CCP represents the leading source of law within the Hungarian legal system. In its Government Decision no. 1267/2013 of 17 May 2013, the Government decided to elaborate a new Code of Civil Procedure in order to create a new procedural framework that is better suited to the more complex legal disputes of the 21st century.1 In April 2016, a draft proposal on the new Code of Civil Procedure elaborated by the Ministry of Justice2 (hereinafter referred to as the MoJ draft proposal on the new CCP) was uploaded to the website “kormany.hu”,3 the publication of which was preceded by a three-year codification process. At the end of the first phase, a collection of studies entitled “Egy új Polgári Perrendtartás alapjai” (The foundations of a new Code of Civil Procedure)4 was published, outlining with scientific depth the potential directions and methods of codification.5 The collection of studies that covers all the central fields of civil procedural law does not only document the large professional debate on the preparations of the codification, but also served as one of the bases for the subsequent public debate and the drafting of the new piece of legislation”.6 At the end of the second phase, a work entitled “The draft version of the provisions and explanatory memorandum of the new Code of Civil Procedure as elaborated by the experts of the Working Committee on the New Code of Civil Procedure” (hereinafter referred to as the Experts’ Draft Proposal on the new CCP)7 was delivered,8 which was followed by the draft proposal of the Ministry of Justice, published on the website “www.kormany.hu”. After an extremely short public debate,9 the MoJ draft proposal was presented to the Government in the second quarter of 2016, and Parliament started to discuss the draft bill on the new Code of Civil Procedure on 2 September 2016. The present study analyses the rules of the new Code of Civil Procedure on access to information and evidence on the basis of Act no. CXXX of 2016 on the Code of Civil Procedure (hereinafter referred to as the new CCP) adopted by Parliament and coming into force on 1 January 2018.

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