Courts’ Practice on Court Fee Waiver

The MDTF JSS continue to implement activities focused on improvement of access to justice. In parallel with the development of the Guide for exemption of court fees the MDTF JSS team in cooperation with the Lawyers' Committee for Human Rights – YUCOM, conducted a research to analyze courts’ practice under proposal for the exemption from payment of court fees in litigation matter to identify challenges that courts have in deciding of proposals.

The team collected data on accepted requests for exemption from procedural costs in 2017 from 23 basic courts. In addition, the courts share 2 decisions on exemption from court fees, one in which request is approved and one in which request was rejected. Due to lack of coherent statistics some courts were not able to share all needed data.

Based on the statistical data and collected cases, the Report identifies legislative gaps and variations in practice. The Report provides practical recommendations how to improve affordability of justice and overcome existing challenges in the court fee waiver system.