Does the court now initiate civil cases on its own initiative? (to the novelization of the Civil Procedure Code of the Russian Federation by Federal Law No. 135-FZ 12.06.2024)

The civil process does not require special evidence, according to which the court cannot initiate civil cases on its own initiative. In various historical eras, this rule was considered a stronghold of the principle of disposition. The article uses historical, normative, and doctrinal material to demonstrate that exceptions to this rule, if they existed, were rare and exceptional, and existed in a specific historical context with an investigative civil process and exaggerated public principles. By Federal Law No. 135-FZ dated June 12, 2024, "On Amendments to the Civil Procedure Code of the Russian Federation," Part Two of Article 313 of the Civil Procedure Code of the Russian Federation was supplemented with five new words, resulting in the following procedural norm regarding one of the categories of special proceedings: "A case for the restoration of a lost judicial proceeding is initiated upon the application of the parties to the case, as well as at the initiative of the court." It is hypothesized that the basis of the permissible exception to the rule is the legislator's doubt about the procedural nature of the relations that arise here, i.e., the evolution of the idea of the non-procedural nature of the court's activities to restore the lost judicial proceedings, as was the case in the Civil Procedure Code of the RSFSR, when this category of cases existed as an appendix to the code. As another hypothesis, it is considered that if the plaintiff had previously expressed their will to initiate a case that was subsequently lost, then a second expression of will may no longer be necessary. However, the authors conclude that there is no reason to deny the just and procedural nature of the activities and relations that arise when the issue of restoring a lost judicial proceeding is addressed. The court's right to initiate proceedings to restore a lost court case on its own initiative is significant in cases where the court faces the need to restore lost materials during the consideration of other cases that are somehow related to the lost case, or in cases where the parties seek to enforce (implement) a court order related to the lost case. This means that the court-initiated proceedings are likely to be dependent on another ongoing case that may require the restoration of a related case. It is concluded that the court's initiation of the issue of restoring a lost judicial proceeding is not the initiation of a case by the court acting as an independent entity, but rather the forced completion of the materials of another case under consideration. The court should be given the right to initiate the restoration of lost judicial proceedings in an ongoing case, just as it initiates the collection of additional evidence. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

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