The current state of the national systems of civil court procedure in foreign countries indicates that today we can observe an increasing impact of internationalization processes on this area of legal regulation, and this is directly associated with issues of harmonization of the national procedural systems and the need for bringing national legislation in compliance with international standards of a fair trial. The constitutional reform in the domain of justice has built a foundation for reforming the civil procedure legislation underlain by the experience of the best European democracies focused on the generally recognized principle of the rule of law and the priority of human rights. In this context, from the perspective of improving the quality of law application and the efficiency of civil court procedure, the key issue is still the issue of updating the catalog of civil court procedure principles and the need for their modern interpretation in the context of natural law discourse. Given this, special attention should be centered on the study of the generally recognized principle of proportionality as an essential requirement of the rule of law in a democratic society and one of the main fundamentals (principles) of the civil court procedure, which is now directly enshrined in the provisions of the Code of Civil Procedure of Ukraine (cl. 6, Part 3, Article 2 of CCP of Ukraine; Article 10–11 of CCP of Ukraine), and, in our opinion, should be interpreted taking into account the European experience. It is worth noting that issues pertaining to the proportionality principle were given the most attention within the framework of the theory of State and law, constitutional law and EU law, with examples of this being the works by such scientists as R. Van Reye, N. Varlamova, H. Hadzhiev, Yu. Yevtoshuk, M. Cohen-Eliia, T. Komarova, S. Pohrebniak, I. Porat, P. Rabinovych. B. Totskyi, T. Fufalko, S. Shevchuk, and others. At the same time, currently a research of implementation of the generally recognized principles of law in certain branches of law is becoming increasingly important. Attempts at analyzing the proportionality principle in the national civil court procedure were made in the works by I. Izarova, I. Yaroshenko, O. Svirina, O. Tkachuk, O. Shtefan, and others. However, the works by these authors are rather fragmentary and do not reveal the specific features of the mechanism of action of the proportionality principle in the civil court procedure. The purpose of the article is to study the generally recognized principle of proportionality as one of the foundations of the civil court procedure meant to ensure a reasonable balance of private and public interests in the situation of administration of justice in civil cases.

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