Qualified request to respond under Section 114b of the Czech Code of Civil Procedure

Practical summary added on 24 October 2026 in line with the current Section 114b of the Czech Code of Civil Procedure.

What to do after receiving a qualified request?

A qualified request (kvalifikovaná výzva) is a resolution by which a Czech court orders the defendant to respond to the lawsuit in writing. If you do not accept the claim in full, you must describe the decisive facts of your defence and attach documentary evidence or identify other evidence. A mere general statement of disagreement may not meet these requirements.

1. Check service and the deadline. The court must set at least 30 days from service of the resolution. If a payment order was issued, it sets this period only from the day the time limit for filing an objection expires. Always work from the specific resolution and its instructions.
2. Prepare a substantive defence. State which of the claimant's assertions you dispute, why, and what evidence supports your explanation. An objection to a payment order and a response to a qualified request are not interchangeable acts.
3. Notify the court of a serious obstacle in time. If a serious reason prevents you from filing a response, notify the court within the set deadline. Do not rely on a mere request for an extension changing the deadline by itself.

What happens if you leave the request unanswered?

If the defendant, without a serious reason, does not respond in time and does not notify the court of a serious obstacle within the deadline, the claim may be deemed admitted and a judgment on admission may follow. The defendant must be instructed about this consequence; the law also sets out exceptions. The resolution is served into the defendant's own hands. The exclusion of substitute service does not apply to delivery to a data box, so it is not safe to rely on the deadline not starting to run if you do not open the message.

Legal basis: Section 114b of the Code of Civil Procedure. We can help prepare your defence as part of our litigation practice.

Detailed explanation and case law

The qualified request was introduced into Czech civil procedure by the amendment to the Code of Civil Procedure made by Act No. 30/2000 Coll., refined by the comprehensive amendment Act No. 7/2009 Coll., and is intended as a means of effectively preparing the hearing and of ascertaining the position of the individual parties in the case. Its main aim is to identify the range of facts in dispute between the parties. In the Code of Civil Procedure, the qualified request is part of the provisions on preparation for the hearing, a mandatory stage of the proceedings that follows their commencement and can be divided into preparation for the hearing under Section 114, preparation with a qualified request under Section 114b and a preparatory hearing under Section 114c. Preparation for the hearing under Section 114 comprises the presiding judge's duty, after the proceedings have commenced, to examine whether the procedural conditions are met and whether any defects in the petition commencing the proceedings, i.e. the lawsuit, have been remedied.

Content of the qualified request

Under Section 114b, if the presiding judge has not used the request under Section 114a(2)(a), or if it was not complied with properly (i.e. sufficiently in the court's view) and in time, he or she may by resolution order the defendant to respond to the case in writing and, if the defendant does not accept the claim in full, to set out in the response the decisive facts on which the defence is based, to attach the documentary evidence relied on, or to identify other evidence to prove the assertions. "Even in the case of a qualified request, a party must set out the decisive facts and propose evidence to prove them within the time limit set by the court. If the party fulfils this procedural duty and responds within that time limit, the factual assertions and evidentiary proposals are not limited by the end of the time limit granted by the court; the parties may freely state further facts and propose evidence to prove them at the hearing." (1) As regards the response itself, the wording of the law shows that the defendant has a duty of allegation and a duty of proof. If the defendant, without a serious reason, does not respond to the court's request in time and does not state what serious reason prevents him or her from doing so, the claim asserted against the defendant is deemed admitted, and the court must instruct the defendant about this. In such a case, as a result of the statutory "fiction", i.e. an irrebuttable legal presumption of admission of the claim, the court issues a judgment on admission (Section 153a), of which the party must also be duly instructed. The fiction of admission of the claim is a sanction for the defendant's inactivity in failing to respond to the request. Since Act No. 7/2009 Coll., the fiction of admission cannot apply where, although the defendant has failed to respond in writing, the statutory conditions for discontinuing the proceedings or rejecting the lawsuit are met (Section 114b(5)).

The fact that a serious reason prevented the defendant from responding to the lawsuit in time is a valid ground of appeal against a judgment on admission only if the defendant also notified the court of first instance of that serious reason within the set deadline; an exception might only be a reason so serious that it prevented the defendant even from notifying the court that a serious reason had arisen preventing a written response within the deadline (e.g. a serious health condition).

Practice shows that the qualified request under Section 114b brings certain problems of interpretation, particularly where it is issued in proceedings in which a payment order or electronic payment order was issued granting the claimant's petition in full and the defendant seeks to have the case heard. It is not unusual for the defendant to file an objection to the payment order but be unable to distinguish which facts are relevant to the claimant's claim and what assertions and evidence must be submitted for the court to deal with the objection — that is, for the defendant to comply with the qualified request under Section 114b to such an extent and of such quality that a judgment on admission under Section 153a(3) is not issued. The Czech Constitutional Court has addressed this issue in the past, in particular in its judgment file no. III. ÚS 3964/17 of 20 March 2018. In that case, the Constitutional Court concluded that the conditions for issuing a judgment on admission for failure to comply with a request under Section 114b "must be interpreted restrictively (exceptiones sunt strictissimae interpretationis). Conversely, a broad interpretation is appropriate where the constitutionally guaranteed right to judicial protection is at stake, in the form of the right of access to a court and to judicial protection through properly conducted court proceedings under Article 36(1) and Article 38(2) of the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms; these fundamental rights are therefore violated if a general court applies Section 114b of the Code of Civil Procedure without first duly considering the possibility of proceeding under Section 114a(2)(a) of the Code of Civil Procedure." In that decision, the Constitutional Court further concluded that "the legislature introduced the so-called qualified request to respond to a lawsuit under Section 114b(1) of the Code of Civil Procedure on the understanding that before each issuance the court would carefully examine whether the conditions for it are met and whether a 'simple' request under Section 114a(2)(a) would not suffice. In no way did the legislature intend for general courts to issue the qualified request automatically, 'thoughtlessly', with every service of a lawsuit on a defendant, and they must always weigh the serious (rather fatal) consequences associated with this request (with a 'non-response' to it). The 'nature of the case' and the 'circumstances of the case' are not such in every case that the court can issue a qualified request mechanically. The court should therefore not issue a qualified request in situations where it is clear from the file that the defendant is otherwise active, evidently does not intend to admit the claim asserted in the lawsuit and intends to participate fully in the dispute before the court — which is exactly the complainant's case in the matter under review."

The court should bear this approach in mind especially where one party to the dispute is clearly in a weaker position, typically in consumer disputes or in proceedings for payment of claims arising, for example, from so-called microloans, where the defendants are usually people without legal training who are unable to realistically assess the content of the obligation or to detect contractual terms contrary to good morals. In such situations, applying a request under Section 114b may have fatal consequences for the defendant: unqualified argumentation in the response to the request or in the objection to a payment order may lead to a fiction of admission of the debt even where it is clear that the defendant certainly does not admit the claim. In such cases, the court should examine the defendant's actual position on the claim.

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[1] HAMUĽÁKOVÁ, K. Zásada koncentrace řízení a její uplatnění v civilním soudním řízení. Prague: Nakladatelství Leges, s.r.o., 2010, p. 48