Overview
Every commercial dispute is a multifaceted and often complex process. At the same time, legal practice has the concept of standards of proof, which, simply put, determines how a court treats the evidence presented and how convincing it finds that evidence in a particular case. Note that in damages disputes, Belarusian and Russian courts apply a very high standard of proof to all evidence submitted by a party to the proceedings (a standard that, in our view, is not always justified in certain cases). Drawing on a damages case in which our team represented the claimant, we continue our analysis of how courts assess evidence.
Mandatory
pre-trial procedure, unless the parties agree otherwise
2026
new procedural rules broaden out-of-court options
Faster
claim accepted on the date it reached the court
Section 01
Pre-Trial Claim: A Formality or a Necessity?
What our team found
Under current legislation, compliance with the pre-trial procedure for resolving a commercial dispute is mandatory unless the parties have agreed otherwise. When reviewing the documents provided by the client, we noticed that the contract contained no exceptions to this rule, meaning that compliance with the pre-trial procedure was mandatory. Moreover, the contract did not specify how, in what form or through what actions the pre-trial procedure could be considered complied with from a procedural standpoint.
Section 02
Ways to Comply with the Pre-Trial Dispute Resolution Procedure (2026)
Key fact
From 2026, new procedural rules have broadened the ways and conditions for resolving disputes out of court.
Under the previous procedural code, the main form of amicable dispute settlement was sending a pre-trial claim. An annex to the Economic Procedural Code of the Republic of Belarus listed the information a party was required to include in a pre-trial claim. The general deadline for responding to a claim is one month, unless the parties’ contract provides otherwise.
In addition, the parties to a commercial contract may agree that they must turn to a mediator before going to court. A mediator is an individual who takes part in the parties’ negotiations as a neutral party in order to help them settle the dispute. In Belarus, the law requires mediators to complete appropriate training and obtain a mediator’s certificate. A mediator must also be entered in the register of the Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Belarus. We covered commercial mediation in detail in our article.
Some contracts state that any disputes arising from the performance of the contract must be resolved by the parties through negotiation. In practice, it can be difficult to prove that negotiations actually took place and what they achieved. If the parties kept minutes of the negotiations, with the final version recording their outcome, such a document may serve as evidence that the pre-trial dispute resolution procedure has been complied with.
Important
However, if the parties chose negotiation as the method of pre-trial dispute resolution but did not exclude the requirement to send a pre-trial claim, a formal complaint will still have to be sent.
Section 03
Pre-Trial Procedure in a Claim for Damages
The documents provided by the client included: emails between managers and technical specialists of the seller and the buyer discussing the defects found and possible ways of establishing their causes; official notices sent by post setting dates for visits to the companies’ production sites to take samples of the disputed products and agreeing on the make-up of the delegations; minutes of production meetings at which the results of the technical assessment of the defective products were discussed and the expert organisations that could carry out a quality examination were agreed upon; and a document titled “pre-trial complaint”, sent by registered mail with acknowledgement of receipt.
From the standpoint of court practice, the most valuable document was the complaint: it had been delivered to the counterparty, and the deadline for responding to it had expired even before the client approached us. The other evidence also showed that the parties had tried to resolve the conflict, but in our experience a Belarusian court would treat it as merely circumstantial (which was confirmed during the litigation).
As a form of pre-trial claim, the client’s complaint had certain shortcomings. In particular, it did not fully meet the requirements of the procedural law in force at the time of the dispute. Having reviewed the document, our team concluded that the client’s demands were not clearly formulated (as noted earlier, the client’s initial strategy differed from the one we proposed), there were no references to legislation (which was understandable, as the client was a foreign company), and no calculation of the amounts claimed was provided. Filing a lawsuit without correcting these shortcomings could have led the court to put the claim on hold (“leave it without progress”): a ruling requiring the claimant to correct the shortcomings within the period set in the judge’s order. If the shortcomings are not corrected, the statement of claim is returned to the claimant together with the supporting documents.
Our approach
Our team advised the client to prepare an updated pre-trial claim that met the requirements of Belarusian law and send it to the counterparty. However, we did not wait for the potential defendant to respond and filed the documents with the court before receiving a reply from the seller. As we had expected, the claim was put on hold: the court issued a ruling pointing out the errors in the complaint and, on that basis, found that the claimant had not complied with the pre-trial dispute resolution procedure. The judge gave the client 12 days to provide evidence to the contrary, failing which the claim would be returned. By the time the court issued its ruling putting the claim on hold, the deadline for responding to our pre-trial claim, as set by the supply agreement, had expired. This allowed us to provide the court with evidence that the shortcomings had been corrected. The court agreed that there were no obstacles to opening proceedings and accepted the claim for consideration.
Importantly, the claim was deemed accepted on the date it reached the court, not on the date the court found that the claimant had corrected the shortcomings. This shortened the overall length of the proceedings and also affected the running of the limitation period.
Next step
Once the court had accepted the claim, a date was set for a preliminary hearing to disclose the evidence submitted and any additional evidence requested by the judge. The procedure and strategy for disclosing evidence is a separate set of issues, which we will discuss in our next article.