Bilateral Treaties on Legal Aid as an Example of Unification of International Civil Procedure

Bilateral treaties play an important role in the international regulation of international procedure matters. Ukraine has nowadays about 30 treaties on legal aid, part of them is binding for Ukraine as the Successor State, and the other was concluded by independent Ukraine. Bilateral treaties of the “Soviet model” regulated matters of legal aid both in private (civil relations) and public (criminal relations) sphere but from the mid ninetieths Ukraine began to conclude particular conventions concerning legal aid in criminal matters. Analyzing peculiarities of these bilateral treaties we have to admit that the majority of them differ from each other as to the contents and the scope. The great deal of treaties was concluded between Ukraine and the countries of Eastern Europe and former Soviet satellites. Unfortunately, the number of treaties concluded between Ukraine and highly-developed Western states are not formidable icpdf.