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China’s New Foreign State Immunity Law: Some Foreign Relations Aspects

Written by Wenliang Zhang (Associate Professor at Renmin University of China Law School), Haoxiang Ruan (PhD Candidate at Renmin University of China Law School), and William S. Dodge (the John D. Ayer Chair in Business Law and Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis School of Law).

On September 1, 2023, the Standing Committee of China’s National People’s Congress (NPC Standing Committee) passed the Law of the People’s Republic of China on Foreign State Immunity (FSIL) (English translation here). The FSIL will enter into force on January 1, 2024.

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Australia’s statutist orthodoxy: High Court confirms the extraterritorial scope of the Australian Consumer Law in the Ruby Princess COVID-cruise case

The Ruby Princess will be remembered by many Australians with disdain as the floating petri dish that kicked off the spread of COVID-19 in Australia. The ship departed Sydney on 8 March 2020, then returned early on 19 March 2020 after an outbreak. Many passengers became sick. Some died. According to the BBC, the ship was ultimately linked to at least 900 infections and 28 deaths.

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The jurisdictional hurdles of s 26 of the Trans-Tasman Proceedings Act 2010 (Cth), in the context of interim anti-enforcement relief in aid of New Zealand proceedings

The New Zealand High Court recently granted a permanent anti-enforcement injunction in relation to a default judgment from Kentucky in Kea Investments Ltd v Wikeley Family Trustee Limited [2023] NZHC 3260. The plaintiff, a British Virgin Islands company, claimed that the defendants had committed a tortious conspiracy against it because the Kentucky default judgment was based on fabricated claims intended to defraud it. The defendants were a New Zealand company, Wikeley Family Trustee Ltd (WFTL), and persons associated with the company.

In an undefended judgment, the High Court granted the injunction, awarded damages for the costs incurred in the foreign proceedings (referring to cases such as Union Discount Co Ltd v Zoller [2001] EWCA Civ 1755, [2002] 1 WLR 1517 by analogy), and issued a declaration that the Kentucky judgment would not be recognised or enforceable in New Zealand. As noted previously on this blog (see here), the case is an interesting example of “the fraud exception to the principles of comity” (Kea Investments Ltd v Wikeley (No 2) [2023] QSC 215 at [192]).

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Out Now: Mazza, ‘Il foro dell’obbligazione nata in internet’

An impressive Italian monograph of more than 400 pages on jurisdiction in internet cases (‘Il foro dell’obbligazione nata in internet’) has just been published.

The author has kindly provided the following summary:

The book addresses the topic of civil jurisdiction over disputes arising on the Internet, observing it from different perspectives. In the first chapter the Author delves into the United States case law on the so-called “Internet torts”, reaching the conclusion that solutions based on the targeting test could be usefully employed to draft an international convention with the aim of establishing rules in the current confusing scenario. In the second and third chapters the doctrine of forum non conveniens and the phenomenon of libel tourism are explored in-depth. The fourth chapter examines the main decisions issued by the CJEU concerning jurisdiction over contractual and extracontractual liability (including cases such as eDate, Bolagsupplysningen, Pammer, etc.), while the fifth chapter is focused solely on Italian procedural rules and case law. In the last two chapters, starting from the assumed need to ensure the effectiveness of judicial remedies, the problems of the extraterritorial scope of online content removal orders as well as important EU Regulations (mostly the Digital Services Act and the GDPR) are examined, with finally a part on the “Schrems saga” and the EU-US agreements on the transfer of personal data (including the EU-US Data Privacy Framework).

ZEuP – Zeitschrift für Europäisches Privatrecht 1/2025

A new issue of ZEuP – Zeitschrift für Europäisches Privatrecht is now available and includes contributions on EU private law, comparative law and legal history, legal unification, private international law, and individual European private law regimes. The full table of content can be accessed here: https://rsw.beck.de/zeitschriften/zeup.

The following contributions might be of particular interest for the readers of this blog: Read more

Call for papers: 3rd Postgraduate Law Conference of the Centre for Private International Law and Transnational Governance (Aberdeen)

The Centre for Private International Law and Transnational Governance of the University of Aberdeen is pleased to announce that it is now accepting submissions for the 3rd Postgraduate Law Conference of the Centre for Private International Law which will take place online on 6 June 2025.  

 Conference Theme: New Dimensions in Private International Law Read more

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