Decision in absentia

The thesis analyses the issues of decision in absentia. This specific method of dispute resolution is necessary to protect the violated party's rights by the other party's passive behaviour. Decision in absentia institute must maintain a balance between the timeliness of civil proceedings and passive party’s procedural rights guarantees while passing decision in absentia. Decision in absentia institute aims to encourage the parties to take care of proceedings, to ensure process efficiency and expand the boundaries of judicial defence. It proved to be quite problematic to agree on the best solution for decision in absentia regulation, thus the Code of Civil Procedure has been considerable controversial. Since the Civil Procedure Code came into force, there were amendments considering not only revision procedures, but also conditions for passing decision in absentia, but in 1st of July 2017 amendments will come into force that will eliminate existed objections, legislator’s errors, therefore it can be expected that the possibility to request the court to hear the case on the merits based on the material on the case-file instead of a ‘genuine’ decision in absentia and the abolition of repeated decision in absentia will prevent abuse, constitute conditions for process timeliness and for effectiveness of the institute. A decision in absentia may be passed when one of the parties, which has been properly informed, fails to attend the preparatory hearing or a hearing or fails to submit a response to the statement of claim or a preparatory document within the time limit specified not having a justifiable reason and has not submitted a request to hear the case in its absence or to delay the hearing but the other party present requests to pass a decision in absentia. The point of decision in absentia institute and regulation of appeal and cassation determine the fact that the party because of which the decision in absentia has been delivered may use special procedure in order to review decision in absentia, but cannot appeal the judgement neither under appellate, nor under cassation