The House of Commons’ report on ‘negotiating priorities for the justice system’ reviews more than conflict of laws, indeed it is a tour d’horizon of most (if not all) issues relevant to Justice and Home Affairs in the EU. Martha Requejo makes a number of valid points on the report and indeed plenty of these, and others, have been made by a number of conflicts commentators: I will not review all here. There is a scholarly cottage industry on post-Brexit issues and the area of private international law is no exception.
The report mentions among others that a role for the CJEU in respect of essentially procedural legislation concerning jurisdiction, applicable law, and the recognition and enforcement of judgments, is a price worth paying to maintain the effective cross-border tools of justice discussed throughout our earlier recommendations. That is a very sensible approach, not just within the overall context of UK /continent judicial co-operation: it is also an obvious lifeline for London’s legal services market. Without proper integration into the EU’s civil procedure corpus, judgments from UK courts will immediately lose a lot of their appeal. The Government however have manoeuvred itself into a cul-de-sac by rejecting a role for the European Court of Justice post Brexit. The report’s call, and many with it, therefore is likely to fall upon deaf ears. Both for the UK and for EU conflicts rules, this will be a great loss. Few continental courts live up to the same standards as their UK counterparts when it comes to applying the intricate detail of conflict of laws, whether EU based or not.
Geert.
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