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EU Becomes the First Party to Accede to the 2019 Hague Judgments Convention
Earlier this week, the Council of the European Union has adopted the decision for the EU to accede to the 2019 Hague Judgments Convention (which, in accordance with Art. 27(1) of the Convention, binds all Member States except Denmark). Once a second party either ratifies, accepts, or approves, or accedes to the Convention, it will enter into force one year after the deposit of the instrument of ratification, acceptance, approval or accession by that second State (Art. 28(1)). More information is available here.
CERIL Report Reviews Cross-Border Effects in European Preventive Restructuring
The independent think tank Conference on European Restructuring and Insolvency Law (CERIL) has published its latest Statement and Report 2022-2 on Cross-Border Effects in European Preventive Restructuring. As EU Member States implement the EU Preventive Restructuring Directive (2019/1023), CERIL has identified and assessed the benefits and shortcomings of applying the EU Insolvency Regulation 2015 (EIR 2015) to govern the cross-border effects of proceedings in national preventive restructuring frameworks. In the absence of an adequate framework for these new preventive restructuring proceedings, the CERIL Report and Statement formulate recommendations to the EU and national legislators.
Three Ways Forward
To date, no tailor-made framework exists which could adequately and effectively facilitate the cross-border effects of these preventive restructuring proceedings. To resolve the legal uncertainty resulting from the lack of a clear regulatory framework, CERIL suggests the following three lines of action. Firstly, as the European Commission will review the application of the EIR 2015 by 27 June 2027, it is recommended that this review critically assesses the adequacy of the EU legislator’s approach laid down in the EIR 2015 and tailor it to also cover in detail these restructuring proceedings. Secondly, CERIL welcomes any early, if not immediate, action of the European Commission towards the adoption of a special cross-border framework to include restructuring proceedings in the EIR 2015, either as a separate chapter or take the form of a separate regulation. Thirdly, CERIL invites all Member States to timely review their cross-border frameworks to enable and/or facilitate the recognition of foreign preventive restructurings. A European rescue culture, endorsed by Directive (2019/1023), should be complemented by an instrument to adequately provide legal effects of any restructuring for creditors and shareholders, wherever they are located.
About CERIL and its project on Cross-Border Dimensions of Preventive Restructuring Proceedings
The Conference on European Restructuring and Insolvency Law (CERIL) is an independent and voluntary non-profit organisation of presently 85 members (conferees), consisting of insolvency practitioners, judges, and academics representing 30 European countries and reflecting a diverse array of national insolvency systems and legal traditions.
In January 2022, CERIL commenced a new project led by Prof. Stephan Madaus (Member of the CERIL Executive, University of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany) and Prof. em. Bob Wessels (CERIL Chair, University of Leiden, the Netherlands). This project addresses the policy issues of identifying (and possibly selecting) the regulatory cross-border framework for the new procedural options introduced in most EU Member States when implementing preventive restructuring frameworks flowing from Directive (2019/1023). CERIL studied the role of the EIR 2015, the Brussels Ibis Regulation, and the current national cross-border laws of Member States. The reporters worked with contributions of a large group of scholars and insolvency practitioners (Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Slovak Republic, Spain, The Netherlands).
Out Now: Yves El Hage, Le droit international privé à l’épreuve de l’internet
With his thesis, which has just been published by LGDJ as part of the prestigious Bibliothèque de droit privé, Yves El Hage makes another, yet formidable addition to the ever-growing body of scholarship on the difficult relationship between private international law and the internet. In the inimitable style of French scholarship, the book consists of two main parts addressing, in turn, “the confrontation” and “the reconciliation” between private international law and the internet (with each part of course being further divided into two sections, and so on).
In the first part, the author convincingly identifies the two core challenges of the internet, i.e. its immateriality (or virtuality) and its universality (or ubiquity). For each of these, he shows how courts and legislators have struggled to find appropriate responses on the basis of traditional PIL rules and methods, with the “territorialist” response to the inherently international nature of online communication a particularly pertinent point of criticism.
In the second part, El Hage discusses two possible ways in which PIL might accommodate these challenges (both of which aim to identify a single competent jurisdiction and a single applicable law). First, he rejects proposals (including my own) that rely mainly, if not solely, on the places in which the individual parties to a litigation have initiated and/or received acts of online communication (so-called “personal” connecting factors). According to him, such criteria do not resolve the existing problems of localisation and fail to accommodate the relevant regulatory interests beyond a purely economic and/or protective logic. Instead, the author proposes, second, to maintain the existing “extrapersonal” connecting factors but to reinterpret them in a way that puts the place of the most significant impact (“l’impact le plus significatif de l’activité en ligne”) into the centre of the analysis.
The extent to which this proposition would differ in practice from proposals relying on “personal” connecting factors, especially from those that try to combine actor- and victim-centred criteria, can certainly be debated. Regardless, the book by Yves El Hage offers both an unusually rich account of the existing (general and specialised) scholarship and a well-argued proposition that flows seamlessly from his thorough analysis of the status quo.