COURT FEE IN COMMERCIAL PROCEEDINGS: LEGAL NATURE, FUNCTIONS, AND LIMITS OF APPLICATION

Abstract

The article examines the financial, budgetary and procedural aspects of the institution of the court fee in the context of conventional and constitutional principles of ensuring the right of business entities to access justice and effective judicial protection. 

The key task is to provide a theoretical justification for a holistic model that will ensure the coordination of the purpose of the court fee for financing judicial proceedings with the procedural nature of commercial litigation and constitutional guarantees of access to justice, defining clear boundaries for its application and collection in accordance with the principles of proportionality and legal certainty.

By its legal nature, a court fee is a type of non-taxable mandatory payment for a specific purpose. Its features are: universal nature of collection throughout the territory of Ukraine; imperative nature as a legal fact with which the law associates the possibility of the emergence, development or termination of procedural legal relations; the basis for payment is the exercise of the right to apply to court for the purpose of performing a procedural action by the court; the grounds for collecting the fee, rates, procedure and terms of payment, payers, benefits are normatively defined and exhaustive, which corresponds to the principles of legality, legal certainty and proportionality. From an economic point of view, the court fee is an instrument for partial compensation of public costs of administering justice (belonging torevenues of the special fund of the State Budget of Ukraine) and at the same time can perform a regulatory function of deterring the filing of unfounded claims (applications, complaints).

The main functions of the court fee include: procedural as a condition for opening proceedings or performing a procedural action; compensatory and regulatory regarding partial compensation of state expenses for the administration of justice; preventive regarding deterring unfounded appeals to court; stimulating regarding pre-trial settlement of the dispute, conclusion of a settlement agreement and use of alternative non-judicial forms of protection.

The procedure for judicial control over the collection of court fees in the context of State compliance with the right to a fair trial and the principle of legal certainty. The legal grounds and limits for the recovery of the court fee unpaid at the stage of filing a claim (application, complaint) are substantiated.decision-making stage in the caseand after the completion of the proceedings in the case - by issuingadditional decision within the three-year period for the execution of the decision.