Thank you to Veerle Van den Eeckhout for the tip-off.

On 10 April 10 2019, the UK Supreme Court handed down its much anticipated judgment in the “Vedanta” case (see here). The judgment is currently raising many comments and discussions on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), including from the perspective of Private International Law.

The PowerPoint (in French) of a presentation by Veerle Van den Eeckhout in March 2017 explains some Private International Law aspects of CSR, including the state of the Vedanta proceedings at that time and its context.

The two volumes of the Luxembourg Reports on European Procedural Law were published early this month. They are the fruits of an evaluation study of national procedural laws and practices in terms of their impact on the free circulation of judgments and on the equivalence and effectiveness of the procedural protection of consumers under EU consumer law.

The volumes present a comparative examination and empirical evaluation of national procedural rules and practices as regards mutual trust and the free circulation of judgments on the one hand, and consumer protection on the other, in light of relevant EU and national legislation and European Court of Justice and domestic case law.

The publication was edited by Burkhard Hess, Stephanie Law & Pietro Ortolani. The Report was prepared by a Consortium of European universities led by the MPI Luxembourg for Procedural Law as commissioned by the European Commission [JUST/2014/RCON/PR/CIVI/0082].

For more information, check here.

To celebrate its 150th birthday, the Société de législation comparée is organizing a comparative law essay competition. It is open to all lawyers, of all nationalities, regardless of their speciality. Membership of the Society is not required to participate.

Entrants will compose, on a subject of their choice, an essay which is supported by comparative legal reasoning.

The submitted text must be unpublished, never formally examined and contain at least 100,000 characters. It can be written in French or English. Entrants must send a print and an electronic version of the text to the Société de législation comparée, 28 rue Saint-Guillaume, 75007 Paris, France and emmanuelle.bouvier@legiscompare.com no later than October 15, 2019. The application form must be attached to the text.

The selection committee will present the results of its deliberations at the Society’s birthday colloquium in December 2019. First prize will be the publication of the text by the Society in the form of a book. Other awards may be given to distinguished candidates by the committee. Other forms of publications may also be proposed.

To download the application form, please click here.

As previously reported on Conflicts of Laws, the ECtHR was requested an advisory opinion by the French Court of Cassation.

On April 10th, the ECtHR delivered its first advisory opinion. It held that:

“In a situation where a child was born abroad through a gestational surrogacy arrangement and was conceived using the gametes of the intended father and a third-party donor, and where the legal parent-child relationship with the intended father has been recognised in domestic law,

1. the child’s right to respect for private life within the meaning of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights requires that domestic law provide a possibility of recognition of a legal parent-child relationship with the intended mother, designated in the birth certificate legally established abroad as the “legal mother”;
2. the child’s right to respect for private life does not require such recognition to take the form of entry in the register of births, marriages and deaths of the details of the birth certificate legally established abroad; another means, such as adoption of the child by the intended mother, may be used”.

For a brief summary of the advisory opinion and the case background see the Press Release.

For further details see the Advisory Opinion.