Diplomatic participation in the international civil procedure

The article considers the question of diplomatic service participation in civil and arbitral proceedings of the cases with a foreign element. The purpose of the article is to find out the main variants of diplomatic participation in the international civil procedure, and also the specialties and problems, connected with it. In the study it was found that the possibilities of diplomatic participation in court proceeding is most fully disclosed in the international acts, such as Vienna Conventions on Diplomatic and Consular Relations. The analysis of the Russian legislation system showed that the national regulatory legal acts, which should define the procedural routine of such participation more specifically, do not always regulate it fully. In judicial practice this fact generates some difficulties both for the participants of the procedure and the trial. After analyzing the Russian national procedural legislation, some particular acts of the inner procedural legislation of the several members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), and the actual international legal acts regulating the diplomatic service, the authors formulate a number of conclusions. First of all, the Russian legislation allows the diplomatic participation in the international civil procedure as a part of the representation institute and as a separate (personal) participation in their interests. Such a duality appears not in all the countries even within the territory of the CIS. Secondly, the question of the consular representation nature in the Russian law remains unresolved. Thirdly, diplomatic (and, in particular, consular) immunity from civil jurisdiction has some exceptions, which are listed in Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (1961), Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (1963), and national legislation acts - Civil Procedure Code of the Russian Federation and Arbitral Procedure Code of the Russian Federation. The provisions of the last two acts upon this question conform to the international legal acts

diplomatic service, consular officer, foreign persons, international civil procedure