Justice Minister Alma Zadić wants to make (green) civil proceedings more digital and cheaper. She sent the amendment for it to be appraised for six weeks. The main focus of the draft law is the legal basis for “Justice 3.0”, the adoption of oral video negotiations into permanent law, as well as partial reductions in certain copying and court fees.
“In the future, the judiciary will be even more digital, cheaper and closer to the citizens. With a new law, we will enable a number of improvements in the course of civil proceedings,” Zadić said in a broadcast on Saturday.
With the civil procedure amendment 2021, it presents the accompanying legal regulations for the digital filing and procedural management at courts and public prosecutors, which has been developed for some time under the heading “Justice 3.0”. It is important “to transfer the established principles of civil proceedings into the digital world while maintaining the usual high level of legal protection and the quality of the proceedings,” emphasized Zadić.
The minister wants to keep the possibility created in the corona pandemic to conduct verbal negotiations via video – whereby the consent of the parties should remain a prerequisite.
Zadić also wants to make access to civil law cheaper: The “copying fees” are no longer generally to be measured by pages. In the case of electronic copies that are handed over on data carriers, the data volume should be decisive. For electronic inquiries via digital file inspection, the minister wants to completely dispense with copying fees. And the court fees for certain settlements will be halved, “so that even more legal disputes can be resolved with one settlement in the future,” Zadić also aims to relieve the judiciary.
