DOMBO BEHEER B.V. v. THE NETHERLANDS JUDGMENT 12 representative (see, inter alia, the Supreme Court’s judgments of 9 January 1942, NJ 1942, 302; 12 January 1973, NJ 1973, 104; 26 October 1979, NJ 1980, 486; 18 November 1984, NJ 1984, 256). 26. Whether or not a person was qualified to be a witness had to be determined in the light of the situation obtaining when he was to make his statement. Under this general rule it was usually assumed that a former director of a legal person, who would have been prevented from giving evidence while he retained his position, qualified as a witness following his dismissal (see, inter alia, the Supreme Court’s judgment of 28 June 1985, NJ 1985, 888). However, this was not the case if the person concerned had not genuinely lost his position within the legal person and where his dismissal had to be construed as a sham (schijnhandeling) (see, inter alia, the Supreme Court’s judgment of 18 November 1983, NJ 1984, 256, and its judgment in the present case of 19 February 1988, published with an annotation in NJ 1988, 725). C. Parties as witnesses: the new law 27. The law of evidence in civil proceedings was extensively amended by the Act of 3 December 1987, Staatsblad (Official Gazette) 590, which entered into force on 1 April 1988. The Bill on which the new law is based dates from as long ago as 1969. One of the reasons why it took so long for this Bill to become law was the controversy surrounding the question whether the above principle - i.e. that parties should not be allowed to testify -should be abandoned or whether, alternatively, it should be accepted that parties might be heard as witnesses. During the parliamentary proceedings this remained the subject of heated debate both in Parliament and outside it, but it was eventually decided to abandon the old practice. Article 190 CCP now allows parties to give evidence as witnesses in their own case. Accordingly, the decisive and supplementary oaths referred to in paragraph 24, sub-paragraph (a), above have ceased to exist. It appears from the drafting history of this legislation that those cases "in which insufficiency of evidence on the part of one party leads to legal inequality" especially led to the conclusion that "the arguments in favour of allowing parties to testify should be given more weight than the fear of bias and problems of assessment, which incidentally are just as likely to occur in the case of other statements by witnesses". As an example of such legal inequality it was mentioned "that a party who is a natural person who is disqualified as a witness may be confronted with (for instance) a party who is a legal person, which is in a position to bring forward ‘third parties’, although the credibility of these witnesses is just as doubtful in view of their close connections with that party or the proceedings. ... [I]t is difficult to see why one individual should be allowed to make a statement under oath in