Mr President, Commissioner de Palacio, ladies and gentlemen, the very high and ever-expanding volume of trade within the Union, and movements of persons on a similar scale, are constantly increasing the likelihood that individual citizens or firms might become involved in cross-border litigation. The cases concerned in this instance are those in which the parties are domiciled in different Member States and which, for that reason, pose certain difficulties. The risk in such situations is that the persons involved might refrain from asserting their rights because of the obstacles that they would encounter in going to law in a foreign country, with unfamiliar legislation and procedures, and the costs that they would have to bear. In many cases, moreover, including for example small claims litigation, legal expenses can even exceed the sum at issue. In other words, a genuine internal market is created by the existence of a common legal area, to which private individuals and firms can have access, without being penalised, regardless of the judicial systems of the different Member States. This is the background which has given rise to the two Green Papers covered by the Commission’s initiative. The first Green Paper deals with the issues of the conversion of the 1980 Rome Convention into a Community instrument and its modernisation. Conversion of the Rome Convention into a Community instrument, as is now being considered, is an additional measure following on from the procedure previously employed for the Brussels Convention and it is certainly useful in that it ensures direct application and uniform interpretation by the Court of Justice. The body of rules should be completed in the future by the Community instrument called Rome II, contained in the recent proposal for a regulation on the law applicable to non-contractual obligations, for which Mrs Wallis is the rapporteur. The need to form the three instruments into a single whole is plain to see and implies not only that the Rome Convention should rapidly be converted into a Community instrument by adopting the necessary regulation, thus making the body of private international law rules homogeneous in terms of source, but also that the goal at a later stage should be codification in the true sense so as to enable the ‘Communitarised’ provisions of Brussels I, Rome I, and Rome II to be grouped together systematically. As for the innovations to be incorporated into the Convention of Rome, first of all we could introduce the principle to ensure that, when the law of a third country was chosen, the primacy of mandatory Community law rules, for instance to protect the weaker party (employees, consumers), would at all events be guaranteed. Furthermore, the scope of the Convention rules should be extended to include insurance contracts, and the provisions on consumer and employment contracts and electronic commerce transactions need to be clarified in some respects to enable them to be coordinated with Community legislation in force. The second Green Paper presented by the Commission, on establishing a European order for payment procedure and on measures to simplify and speed up small claims litigation, is also of the utmost significance. It is a matter of no little importance for many European citizens and firms, in particular SMEs, to be sure that they can recover claims, and do so rapidly, especially when litigation has cross-border implications because the debtor is domiciled in a foreign country or the judgment has to be enforced abroad. The added value of procedures to achieve that end, which would have to be laid down under a Community regulation for the reasons already set out regarding the Rome Convention, would lie in the fact that judgments would be enforceable throughout the Union without resorting to exequatur, thus making it possible to recover huge quantities of uncontested claims or settle cases in which creditors would otherwise be fundamentally disinclined to proceed. The regulation will also need to define the entire order for payment procedure, specifying the requirements applicable to creditors’ claims so as to establish a common measure affording certainty as to procedure and, where possible, costs. Some further comments should be made about the European order for payment. The first question to answer is whether the procedure should be confined to cross-border cases or could also be applied to litigation between parties domiciled in the same country. Bearing in mind that not all Member States have a special procedure of this type in their procedural law and those procedures that do exist differ substantially, it would be desirable, in order to avoid unequal treatment of creditors in different categories, for parties to have the option of using the order in domestic litigation as well.

Political group: PPE-DE