Electronic Evidence in Arbitration in Russia and International Commercial Arbitration: a Comparative Analysis.

Due to the technological progress, new ways of communicating information and new forms of the electronic information appeared. In the modern Russian commercial procedure parties begin to provide more electronic evidence to improve particular facts due to intensive development of modern technologies (IT). This evidence includes electronic documents, e-mails, short messages from mobile messengers. Especially often such evidence is presented in commercial courts in the process of resolving economic disputes between commercial organizations. However, the term of electronic evidence isn’t defined in the Commercial Procedure Code of Russian Federation. The scope of this research is defining the natural characteristics of electronic evidence, manner of producing such evidence in the Russian commercial proceeding and in the International arbitration. Also it is important to find out how electronic evidence is defined in Russian and foreign literature and how it was realized in case-law. In the course of this work, the author comes to the conclusion that electronic evidence is a special kind of evidence, they can be considered as a special form of written evidence, but with the application of special rules due to their technical peculiarities. In order to unify the rules for the study of electronic evidence, the judiciary together with information technology specialists have to develop rules that would introduce the definition of electronic evidence into the legal field, qualify the characteristics of such evidence, establish the procedure for their presentation to the court.