The unification of international civil procedural law of the European Union

Research Project

The project examines the development of the European Union’s unified international civil procedural law from a legal historical and comparative perspective. Today, international jurisdiction as well as the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments in civil and commercial matters are governed in the EU by the Brussels I-bis Regulation. This regulation has its origin in the 1968 Brussels Convention on Jurisdiction and the Recognition and Enforcement of Judgments in Civil and Commercial Matters (Brussels Convention). The Brussels Convention was the first convention in the area of international civil procedural law between the founding states of the European Economic Community (EEC) and is considered a milestone in the unification of this area of law.

This project asks how the negotiations between the EEC member states that led to the signing of the Brussels Convention were structured, whether the biographies of negotiators with a particular interest in unification played a role or whether other factors drove the negotiations, what lines of conflict emerged and how these were resolved. In the first part of the project, the national procedural laws of the EEC member states as well as the bilateral treaties in force prior to the Brussels Convention will be compared in order to contextualise the contemporary understanding of international civil procedural law and to determine whether national rules served as guidelines for the Convention. The second part of the project is devoted to the actual negotiations: starting with the Commission’s unification initiative in 1959, both the organisational structures of the so-called ‘Committee of Experts’ and the substantive debates on the genesis of the norms will be analysed. Archival sources as well as biographical and comparative legal approaches will be used to examine the negotiations between the six EEC founding states in this early phase of European legal integration. Building on the insights of the second part, the third part will go on to analyse the negotiations on the so-called Luxembourg Protocol, which was signed on 3 June 1971 and regulates the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice with regard to the interpretation of the Brussels Convention.

At the intersection of EU legal history, international civil procedural law and international law, the project analyses the origins of the Brussels Convention and thus contributes to the historical contextualisation and better understanding of European international procedural law in civil and commercial matters.