The Qatari legislator mentioned the term “rejection” in article (374-Repeated-subarticle (1)) from the civil and commercial procedure law -2019 amendments, while the legislator mentioned the word explicitly, a definition of the word “rejection” was not illustrated, referring to various dictionaries, the word rejection means the act of not accepting, believing or considering something.

It has always been the case where parties submit a photocopy of an original document to the court, upon that, the party the document is submitted against has the right to reject the photocopy in order to weaken its opponents position  by questioning the authenticity of the aforementioned document, furthermore , the party could ask the court to oblige the party submitting the photocopy to submit the original document in order for the court to consider it valid and authentic and in such scenario, if the party submitting the photocopy couldn’t manage to submit the original document, the court must not consider the photocopy as an effective document nor could rely on it in any decision related to the case.

Such acts by courts are consistent and approved by the highest degree court in the country, the court of cassation and in many precedents have established the legitimacy of such act whereby we mention some of them as follows:

  • Judgement number (257/2015)-commercial and civil circuit: “If the photocopy submitter claims that the original document is attached to another case or is filed with one of the official authorities, the court must enable him to obtain it or an identical copy whenever his opponent rejects the photocopy “.
  • Judgement number (441/2017)-commercial and civil circuit: “If the document is submitted as a scanned image of automatic data messages or E-mails, it gains the authenticity of proof that is equal to documents that are transcribed and affixed to a written signature and the documents remains resistant to the opponent’s rejection and the request of submitting the original document cannot be made, as long as it has been proven that the document contains nothing but a transcript of what the E-mail or Electronic medium in question contains.”
  • Judgement umber (275/2016)-commercial and civil circuit: “ The customary document is considered to have been issued by the person who signed it unless he explicitly denies what is attributed to him in terms of handwriting, signature, stamp or fingerprint, meaning that the signature, the stamp imprint or the fingerprint is the only legal source to give authenticity to the customary paper, meaning that if the issuer denied the existence of his signature, stamp or fingerprint then the photocopy can’t be used for further proof, but the second sub-article of article 200 of the civil and commercial procedural law states that if a the court discussed a the subject matter of a customary document, then none of the parties can question the authenticity of the photocopy by denying the signature, stamp or fingerprint, this article can be justified as the court doesn’t discuss any document unless the case parties have reviewed it and took their  full right of objecting on any document submitted, in other words parties have implicitly agreed on the authenticity of the documents submitted, while in this stage of litigation, this denial is only used to adjourn the hearings and decisions, in other words wining time, and this was confronted by the legislator in the aforementioned article.

Last but not least, the burden of proof relies upon who denies the signature, stamp or fingerprint according to article 236 of the civil and commercial procedural law.

Authors: Mr. Mohamed Zied Boussetta & Contributor Mr. Mohammad Mufid Ratib Qurashi

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