On the Concept of Reconciliation Procedures and Their Value Orientations

Conciliation procedures are one of the obvious and most iconic trends of the modern civilizational process. In Russia, a new round of their development was given by the Federal Law of 28 November 2018 No. 451-FZ (as amended by the Federal Law of 26 July 2019 No. 197-FZ). The Resolution of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation of 31 October 2019 No. 41 approved the Rules of Judicial Conciliation. However, after two years, accompanied by active scientific discussions, no unity of views on the existing – or desirable – concept of conciliation procedures in general and their individual types has been developed. One of the reasons is the difference in values and understanding of conciliation – as a factual goal or as a way of achieving a legal goal. According to the author of the article, such “opposition” is artificial and removable by legal means. We argue the thesis that the legislative concept of conciliation procedures, judicial, non-procedural and non-judicial, and its realization must correlate with the type of process and historically developed methodology of civil procedure. The author formulates and analyzes the problems of hermeneutics of “conciliation”, the understanding and purpose of the reconciliation procedures provided by law, judicial conciliation as an emerging delegated conciliation procedure, legal qualification of the results of non-judicial conciliation procedure. It is argued that the universum of procedure as a legal tool has an inexhaustible potential in the horizontal harmonization of civil procedure.