Civil proceedings in court are adversarial. This means that each party has a duty to find and present their evidence and their arguments.
The court itself will not search for evidence or arguments, but will only follow the law. The role of judges and court is not to look for objective truth, but to decide the case based on evidence provided primarily by parties of dispute. The judges of the court will decide in favour of the party, which has more convincing legal arguments and evidence to support it. Therefore, it is very important that the parties have equal opportunity to do this.
In principle, this ensures that you have a right to know what evidence and arguments the other party has and to also comment on them. Your opponent has the same right with regard to your evidence. This principle goes hand in hand with the requirement that both parties to the case must be equal.
According to Slovak law, you and your opponent in civil proceedings have the right to access the case file, submit evidence, participate in a review of the evidence at the trial, to present your observations and arguments, and to make objections to the requests and arguments of your opponent etc.
important There is a certain type of judicial civil procedure, the aim of which is not to decide on a dispute between the parties but to decide on a certain matter on the basis of facts established by a court. For example, divorce proceedings are not dispute litigations even if two former spouses oppose each other, but the court must decide whether the conditions of law for divorce are met. This type of procedure is non-adversarial and is regulated by a special Civil Non-Adversarial Proceedings Code.