The Right of Litigant Parties to Information Regarding Reasons, Defences and Claims in the Exercise of the Principle of Adversariality in the Civil Process. The Perspective of French Law

This article aims to identify the concrete content of three rights deriving from the principle of adversariality in the civil litigation, i.e. the right to know, the right to information and the right to understand and, consequently, to establish a logical correlation between them. Next, the article aims to establish the concrete content of the right to know together with the requirements that the right to information must meet, with the analysis of the temporality of this right. We used as methodological pillars the bibliographic research, the comparative method using French doctrine and regulation, the inductive method to highlight the existence of the triplet right to know – right to information – right to understanding within the construction of the principle of adversariality and to extract the conditions associated with the right to information. The article tends to highlight the need to be aware of the importance of the right to information regarding reasons, defences and claims in the civil process, often disregarded in practice. It warns the participants in the civil process, be they parties or the Court, that the basis of the right to an effective adversarial litigation is necessarily the right to information and that its requirements must be met.