Interrogation Of Witnesses In The Different Jurisdictions
Mondaq Business Briefing › Switzerland Law Articles in English (2011)
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Interrogation Of Witnesses In The Different Jurisdictions
Interesting Aspects of the Revision of the Procedural Law in Switzerland for the foreign Litigants
1. INTRODUCTION The Swiss tiny territory, which used to grant to its cantons the right to organize their courts and the procedural laws governing them, decided to fuse 26 different procedural laws, as many as Swiss cantons. Although the material law has been standardized for more than one century (civil law, law of contract) and that the Cantons are required to enforce it, the practical situations still arouse some questions to which the codes may give completely different answers. To make the matter worse, there is much custom that only the local lawyers are able to master. Hence, the leading of proceedings out of one's own canton turns out to be a sort of difficult, laborious and perilous undertaking. For the litigants, clients of the attorneys in charge of their cases, the current situation involves a lot of additional costs. Indeed, every time that one passes the borders of a canton, he has to brief a new attorney, needing the whole context of the case to fulfil his tasks correctly and efficiently. Likewise, the multiplicity of the procedural laws also hinders the free movement of lawyers inside the country, whereas it is a personal right under the constitution. These circumstances have also a detrimental effect on the liberty of the choice of the lawyer, because one has to be assisted by a practitioner of the jurisdiction in question, who is not the lawyer that the client trusts. To deal with the most obvious improprieties, the case law of the federal Court and provisions widely scattered in the federal legislation made up rules that are crucial to enforce the c...See the full content of this document
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