Newsletter
AMENDMENTS TO CODE OF CIVIL PROCEDURE AND ITS ENFORCEMENT LAW
On 14 January 2003 the Legislative Yuan en-acted amendments to the Code of Civil Proce-dure (CCP), which were promulgated by the President on 7 February, and are to take effect on a date to be set by the Judicial Yuan. 206 exist-ing articles were amended, 7 articles repealed, and 72 new articles added. Thus the amend-ments affect a total of 285 articles, or almost half the articles in the Code. At the same time, the Law Governing Court Fees, which has been in force for decades, was repealed, and provisions on the valuation of the subject matter of litigation and the assessment of court fees were incorpo-rated into the CCP.
The changes cover jurisdictional rules; class ac-tions; intervention; legal aid; service of process; suspension of proceedings; introduction of the court's legal affairs officers; protection of liti-gants' and third parties' privacy and trade secrets; enhancement of the settlement system; penalties against frivolous litigation; overhauling of sec-ond-instance proceedings to strictly exclude the rehearing of facts or evidence already deter-mined by the first-instance court; strengthing the role of third-instance proceedings in legal review; introduction of new objection procedures against court rulings; retrial procedures; introduction of action for revocation by a third party; and im-proving public summons procedures to better protect the interests of bona fide third parties.
We will present a detailed analysis of the amendments in our next issue.