Recovery of lost proceedings

Restoration of lost court proceedings is one of the ways to protect the rights of participants in civil proceedings. The practice of the European Court of Human Rights is based on the fact that the execution of a court decision is an integral part of the judicial process itself, therefore the judicial process cannot be disrupted, in particular in cases where the court decision cannot be executed due to the loss of the proceedings itself.

At the moment, in Ukraine, all the circumstances have developed for the fact that the relevant section of the Civil Procedure Code of Ukraine will be increasingly applied in practice. There are a number of objective reasons for this: the suspension of the activities of the courts in the territory of the temporarily occupied Crimea and some areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, the conduct of anti-terrorist operations, full-scale aggression by Russia with the occupation of certain areas of the Kherson, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhya, and Mykolaiv regions, constant missile attacks on the authorities state authorities and courts, which, accordingly, may lead to the physical loss of entire archives in the respective courts. Of course, subjective reasons for the negligence of certain officials should not be excluded from this list, although such cases are a minority. 

When can an average Ukrainian face the need to resume lost court proceedings. Note that the court can also act as the initiator of the resumption of the proceedings, but we are currently interested in the cases of the initiation of this process by the participants in the court proceedings. If you have lost a court decision (for example, you have lost a court decision on divorce, you cannot find a court decision on deprivation of parental rights or adoption, etc.) or for objective reasons you need to obtain a duplicate of one or another decision, for example, to affix an apostille, you have apply in writing to the court that rendered the decision you need. However, this court is located in the temporarily occupied territory, does not function due to hostilities in the region, or in general, due to a fire in the court, the archive of all court cases has been lost, in such a case, the only option to obtain the necessary court decision is to initiate the procedure for restoring the lost proceedings.

It is important to note that it is necessary to apply for the reopening of the proceedings to the court that considered the case on its merits. That is, if you want to receive a decision of the appellate or cassation instance, the application to resume the lost proceedings is sent to the court of first instance. In addition, such a procedure is provided only for cases that have been decided on the merits, that is, a decision in the case or a resolution to close the proceedings has been issued, regardless of whether such a decision/resolution has entered into force. If the relevant court of first instance no longer functions as a judicial body in a certain territory, according to the relevant orders, the powers of this court are transferred to another court located in a "safe" or unoccupied territory and the appeal is sent to this court.

In order to restore lost proceedings, the initiator of the process must indicate the purpose of such restoration, as well as provide all available documents, materials, and information that can help the court restore the case materials. Based on the documents submitted and available to the court, the court by its decision restores the lost court proceedings or part of the lost materials, while noting in the decision the essence and justification of such restoration, the essence of the decision rendered in the case. It is this decision of the court on the resumption of lost proceedings that will serve as the final document in your case in the future. That is, if you want to receive a duplicate of the court decision on divorce of the Luhansk court, while the case materials were not transferred to the controlled territory, then as a result of the resumption of the lost proceedings, you will not receive a court decision on divorce, but rather a court decision on the resumption of lost proceedings, which will it is stated that in the previously lost proceedings, a divorce case was considered and it was decided to essentially dissolve the marriage of citizen A with citizen B. This decision, after entering into force, is final and can be used by you as a final document confirming the fact of the dissolution of the marriage.

JU ENWOLT lawyers have extensive experience in representing clients' interests in cases of recovery of lost legal proceedings, they will advise you on all issues, help you collect documents, file an application and get the desired result as soon as possible. We will be happy to help!