Expert evidence under the New Civil Procedure Act of North Macedonia
In North Macedonia, civil proceedings are adversarial in nature, meaning that, as a rule, it is for the parties to make and prove the factual allegations relevant to the dispute. When the understanding of the relevant facts requires expert knowledge not available to the court, the parties prove their allegations via expert opinion.
Before the adoption of the 2026 Civil Procedure Act, a party was, as a rule, required to procure an expert report on its own and submit it along with the lawsuit or, as the case may be, the answer to the lawsuit. A party was entitled to request the court to appoint an expert only if it could demonstrate to the court that it was unable to obtain an expert opinion on its own.
The new 2026 Civil Procedure Act relaxes the foregoing rule by allowing a party to ask the court to appoint an expert in any case and not only when the party can demonstrate its own inability to find an expert. In its motion to the court to appoint an expert, the party may nominate the expert. If the counterparty disagrees with the nomination, the court shall randomly choose an expert electronically from among the licensed experts registered in the Register of Court Experts.
The possibility to submit a report of a party-appointed expert along with a party's submission on the merits remains. However, a party no longer has to do so when submitting the lawsuit or, as the case may be, the answer to the lawsuit. It may submit a report of its own expert at any time before the commencement of the evidentiary phase of the proceedings. The court will decide on whether to admit such report into evidence upon hearing the counterparty's comments on the issue.
Another novelty is that, as an exception to the adversarial nature of the proceedings, the new legislation empowers the judge to appoint an expert even if no party has made a motion to that effect, if the judge considers it necessary for the proper determination of facts in dispute. The expert is in that case appointed before the commencement of the evidentiary phase of the proceedings, by random choice from the online list in the Register of Court Experts.
As under the old legislation, both the parties and the court remain confined to experts licensed by the Ministry of Justice and entered in the Register of Court Experts. Thus, even when the party hires an expert and submits the report together with the brief on the merits, the party cannot rely on the expertise of a person it believes is competent in the relevant field if the person is not vetted by the Ministry of Justice. The restriction appears unnecessary, given that the court is in any event in charge of evaluating expert reports and is in any event empowered to appoint on its own initiative an expert from the vetted list.