Written by Dr. Delphine Porcheron, Associate Professor at the University of Strasbourg Law Faculty

On October 19 and 20, the University of Strasbourg is organizing a symposium on Reparation for “Crimes of the Past”.

Mass crimes, deportations, spoliations, colonial exploitation, slavery… The “crimes of the past” are first known to us as historical facts. Their protagonists have mostly disappeared; they have been documented by historians; almost all of them are mentioned in school textbooks. They have become part of our collective memory as disastrous episodes of a bygone past.

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The 2023 Annual Conference of the Chinese Society of Private International Law was held on 14-16 of September in Wuhan, PRC. This is probably the most important academic event for Chinese scholars specializing and researching in the area of private international law. This year, there were more than 300 participants.

After the HCCH Asia Pacific Week in Hong Kong, the Secretary General of the HCCH, Dr. Christophe Bernasconi was invited to attend the conference and give a speech. He was also invited to act as a commentator for a panel of plenary session which was conducted in English.

The second issue of 2023 of the Rivista di diritto internazionale privato e processuale (RDIPP, published by CEDAM) was just released. It features:

Yuriko Haga, Professor at Seikei University, Avatars, Personalities in the Metaverse: Introductory Analysis on Conflict-of-Laws

When people perform various activities in the metaverse, another world on the Internet, they make avatars as their “proxy”, representing their personality. However, the connection between an avatar and its user is often unclear. In fact, avatars do not necessarily resemble to their user’s figure or face because people can decide its appearance at their disposal. The first question thus arises as to whether the attack on an avatar can be assimilated to an attack on the personality of a user, a person in real world. An avatar should be deemed part of the online personality of its user, and, considering the existing theory of personality rights, it is not completely separate from the person in the real world. Therefore, an attack brought against an avatar can deemed more or less an infringement against the user’s personality. The second question is then how to select the applicable law to such cases. An infringement of personality rights in the metaverse is by nature “international” because users can connect to that virtual “world” from all corners of the planet. This leads to a difficulty in determining the place that the connecting factor designates. This paper examines the applicability of actual Japanese conflict-of-laws rule to issues occurring in the metaverse to show its boundary. The traditional theory posits to apply national laws to resolve legal issues, but the world of metaverse is often governed by rules of its own. It follows that the conflict-of-laws theory should now consider the applicability of the rules of other communities, such as the metaverse.

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Does a preliminary contract obliging the parties to conclude a future ‘contract for the provisions of services’ within the meaning of Article 7(1)(b) of the Brussels I bis Regulation borrow its characterisation from such a future contract and, as a consequence, the claims resulting from this preliminary contract can be brought before the courts for the place where the services were or should have been provided? This is the question that the Court of Justice answered in the negative in its judgment handed down this morning in the case EXTÉRIA, C-393/22.

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