The new Civil Procedure Code of Hungary has been adopted

After a 3-year long preparatory process, the Hungarian Parliament adopted the new Civil Procedure Code (“new CPC”) last week, on 22 November 2016. The new CPC replaces the current Code widely known as “Pp.”, which will have served 65 years as the basic point of reference for all litigious and non-litigious civil and administrative court cases when the new CPC takes over its place on 1 January 2018. The nearly lifelong history of the “old CPC” encompasses more than 150 different text versions due to numerous amendments (over 100) made to the original text, which eventually necessitated a brand-new code to overcome difficulties of interpretation and coherence issues. The new legislation has also been brought about by a number of external factors, such as the changes in the regulatory and other new statutes as e.g. the new Civil Code, just as much as the need for a more efficient procedural regime that better reflects the spirit and requirements of the 21st century ensuring a much faster completion of court cases. Accordingly, the new CPC redefines the structure of civil proceedings by creating two distinct stages of the proceedings, placing more emphasis on the preparatory stage (in Hungarian: “perfelvételi szak”) where the framework of the legal dispute and proceedings is defined by the parties with the facilitation provided by the court. This stage is chiefly determined by the concept that parties should not withhold any relevant information, so as to allow the case to be adjudged preferably at a single hearing in the next stage (in Hungarian: “érdemi tárgyalási szak”). This naturally implies that previously established procedural strategies commonly used before courts (the “wait and let die” tactics) must be reconsidered and new approaches must be developed based on the requirement of being more pro-active from the beginning. These changes are also pivotal in terms of lawyer liability. Evidentiary procedures will also see some relevant changes, e.g. the legal concept of private experts (which parties willingly use to challenge the conclusions of court-appointed experts) is acknowledged by the new CPC as a transparent contributor to the proceedings in certain cases (transparency being ensured by certain obligations of the party and the private expert to reveal the scope of the mandate, to be present at the hearing etc.). As another relevant change, the new CPC will not apply to the court review proceedings of administrative decisions.

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