Correction of judgment
Under rectification of a judgment is understood in German law by § 319 ZPO the subsequent correction of a decision already adopted by the trial court. The correction of the judgment is made ex officio and does not require any application by the parties involved . It is to be distinguished from the judgment supplement .
A correction of the judgment comes into consideration in the case of obvious errors in the decision such as wrong date, wrong description of those involved, calculation errors, but z. B. also a missing decision on costs . The prerequisite is that what was declared by the court in the judgment does not match what was intended and that this error is obvious to third parties, ie that it arises from the context of the decision itself or at least from the circumstances at the time of issuance. An analogous application to other cases is denied by the case law, for example if the cost decision was subsequently incorrect as a result of a successful complaint about the amount in dispute .
In principle, the approval of an appeal requiring approval can also be made up for by means of the correction of the judgment, if the reasons for the decision show that the court wanted to grant the appeal and has simply forgotten to include a corresponding statement in the sentence. However, the subsequent correction of the judgment has no influence on the course of the deadlines for appeal; something else only applies if the content of the decision was so unclear that a person seeking legal protection could not see that the court wanted to allow further legal remedies with the decision, e.g. B. if the tenor and reasons for the decision contradict one another.
The correction of the judgment can be carried out by any judge working at the court; it does not have to be the judge who originally made the decision.
