Administrative procedure is a regulated process and contains procedural rules that must be followed by all authorities deciding on the rights, obligations or legal benefits of individuals and legal persons. The law govering administrative procedure is the General Administrative Procedure Act. The administrative procedure goes through different stages. One of the stages is the evidentiary process, which is the process of gathering facts and choosing the evidence on the basis of its strength. The General Administrative Procedure Act regulates the following means of proof: documents, witnesses, client's statements, experts and inspection. These are not the only means of proof, as anything can be used as evidence to establish the facts, but they are the most commonly used means under the law which as well regulates how they are used. The purpose of evidence is therefore to establish the true state of a matter and to give a lawful and correct decision on it. If it occurs that the relevant facts are not correct, the decision is likely to be wrong.
The focus of the thesis is on the definition of evidence in administrative proceedings, as this is an interesting interplay of rules and concrete facts in a given case. The objectives were to examine the administrative procedure and to analyse the evidence under the General Administrative Procedure Act in a comprehensive way. Various methods were used to write the thesis, such as the descriptive method, the normative method, the case study method and the synthesis and evaluation method. All these methods have contributed to research in the field. Through my research, I have discovered that in practice there are many dilemmas and disputes in the field of evidence. In additions, in practice the problems arise mainly in the classification of evidence according to its probative value. This also allowed me to reject and confirm my hypothesis.
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