Available in Russian
Authors: Alexander Kostin, Alexey Dolgushin
DOI: 10.21128/2226-2059-2024-3-108-122
Keywords: international civil process; service of legal process; The Hague Convention 1965; international legal assistance
If evidence of successful notification of court proceedings to a foreign party is not presented in court, the judicial proceeding has to be postponed until this evidence is received. Postponement of trial results in delaying the judicial protection of rights. Sanctions and restrictions applied by countries in modern international relations create may situations where the service of notice to a foreign party can take a long time or be impossible in principle. The article contains an analysis of the subjective and objective factors in the practice of Russian and foreign courts which obstruct transnational service of notice. Taking each of these factors into account, the article reviews existing international rules, including the Hague Convention of 1965 and the Russian Federation’s international agreements on legal means for overcoming the failure to serve notice. The authors conclude that the Hague Convention of 1965 provides the most efficient mechanism to overcome failure of service caused by either subjective factors regarding the party to be served or objective reasons. By contrast other international treaties on legal assistance on civil matters contain less detailed wording, either not regulating the effect of failure of service at all or regulating the issue indirectly. But the lack of unambiguous regulation of this issue in international law does not mean it is absent in practice. There are various methods applied by courts to fill this regulation gap, ranging from repeated postponements of trial to service of notice in ways not provided by treaty or national legislation. These unsystematic solutions cannot be considered effective ways to fill the regulation gap. In search of effective ways the authors evaluate the possibility of simplified standards of service of notice using contemporary technology (for example, by email or SMS). The authors conclude that these methods might be appropriate only as provided for by treaty and only if certain conditions are met. Alternatively, the authors propose solutions analogous to those in the Hague Convention of 1965 which would be based on existing Russian procedural norms.
About the authors: Alexander Kostin – Candidate of Sciences (Ph.D.) in Law, Senior Research Fellow, Associate Professor at Research Centre on Private Law named after S.S.Alekseev under the President of the Russian Federation, Associate Professor at the Department of International Private and Civil Law, MGIMO University, Moscow, Russia; Alexey Dolgushin – Ph.D. student, Novosibirsk State University of Economics and Management (NSUEM), Master of Private Law, MGIMO University, Moscow, Russia .
Citation: Kostin A., Dolgushin A. (2024) Nevozmozhnost' vrucheniya sudebnogo izveshcheniya na territorii inostrannogo gosudarstva: regulirovanie i pravovye posledstviya [Failure to serve a foreign party to a court proceeding: regulation and legal effect]. Mezhdunarodnoe pravosudie, vol.14, no.3, pp.108–122. (In Russian).
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