Fact-finding: Must Parties Tell The Truth (and/‌or Must The Judge Seek It)?

This comparative project began with three working hypotheses. The first was that both the Dutch article codifying the duty of parties to tell the truth in civil procedures and the article codifying the powers of the civil judge to ask for additional information reflect what might be referred to as ‘legal culture’ – which made me assume that the law in the books on these topics might differ from the law in practice. The second was that as the German and French articles on these topics were much older than the Dutch ones, German and French law would have more developed statutory provisions and case law on the topics. The third was that as Belgian law had also been grappling with these topics for some time without codifying a solution, Belgian legal practice might have found some workarounds that could be helpful for the Dutch legal practice as well. This contribution explains how the outcomes of this research project suggest that the first hypothesis is correct; the second is not, and the third is not entirely correct.