How can a lawyer file documents when the E-court is up?

Over the past few months, the E-court subsystem of the Unified Judicial Information and Communication System (UJICS) has become more frequent. The service is very slow or the page is unavailable. This creates obstacles to the practice of law.

The Ukrainian National Bar Association drew attention to this problem in a letter to the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Legal Policy and the High Council of Justice.

Earlier, the legislation introduced the obligation for parties to proceedings to register electronic accounts in the UJICS and determined the procedure for the court to serve documents in cases exclusively in electronic form by sending them to the electronic account (Laws No. 3200-IX of June 29, 2023 and No. 3424-IX of October 19, 2023).

Attorneys have also registered electronic offices in the E-court to receive and submit documents to the court. System malfunctions, problems with power supply, and Internet instability significantly affect their ability to organize their work. At the same time, these obstacles are not always accepted by the court as grounds for postponing the court hearing or extending the deadline for submitting procedural documents.

Art. 14 of the CPC, Art. 6 of the EPC, Art. 18 of the CAP stipulate that in the conditions of martial law or a state of emergency, in case of a power outage in the court or other circumstances that make it impossible for the UJICS to function, the court may serve any documents in cases in which such a person participates in paper form to the person who has registered the electronic cabinet.

Today, the procedural legislation defines two forms of submitting documents to the court for entities that have electronic offices in the UJICS: paper and electronic (through the E-court subsystem).

At the same time, there are cases when a procedural document needs to be submitted to the court urgently or the location of a party to the case is outside the location of postal services.

In view of these circumstances, it would be worth supplementing the procedural legislation with a provision stating that in case of confirmation of the technical impossibility of using the E-Court subsystem, a party to a case who is obliged to submit documents in electronic form exclusively using the electronic cabinet in the UJICS may submit procedural documents signed with a qualified electronic signature and evidence of the impossibility of using the E-Court subsystem to the official e-mail address of the court.

For the full text of the UNBA's proposals, please follow the link.