Between North and East - Comparative studies on pre-trial procedure between the Nordic and Former East European countries

The study covers pre-trial stage in civil procedure (and is mainly focused on the non-mandatory cases) from comparative perspective between the Nordic and the former East European countries.

One of the greatest challenges for today’s civil procedural law all over the world is effectiveness and speediness. It is not enough to do justice, it is also necessary to do it in time. In order to achieve this objective legislators tend to introduce new legal institutions and carry out overall reforms affecting even the structure and the role of the judiciary and the course of civil litigation. One of the ways how legal disputes can be adjudicated within a reasonable time and soundly is to emphasize the role of the preparatory phase of the proceeding and make the parties more active in solving their dispute. Legislators also tend to ease the workload of the courts by actuating the parties to choose alternative ways of dispute resolution (especially mediation) even with the participation of the courts. This study aims at throwing light on two different but special streamlines of European development in this field: one of them is the Scandinavian trend; the other is the development in Baltic and other former East-European countries.

Four Scandinavian countries, in the other words Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark are involved and in addition all former East-European countries which joined in the EU in 2004 which are Poland, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Hungary.

Even though the original roots of all chosen countries were close to each other (i.e. adopting the continental system), after the 2nd world war the development of these procedural regimes took different directions, while now face similar problems again. The study attempts to show up similar ways of thinking bearing in mind, nevertheless, that the previous directions of development of civil procedural laws may result in different solutions. In short: The idea is to compare current trends in Scandinavian and former East-European countries.