Overseas Union Insurance Ltd and Deutsche Ruck Uk Reinsurance Ltd and Pine Top Insurance Company Ltd v New Hampshire Insurance Company.
Date: 1991-06-27
15 The interpretation suggested by the wording is borne out by an examination of the aims of the Convention. In the judgment of 11 January 1990 in Case C-220/88 (Dumez France and Tracoba v Hessische Landesbank and Others [1990] ECR I-49), the Court held that essentially the aim of the Convention was to promote the recognition and enforcement of judgments in States other than those in which they were delivered and that it was therefore indispensable to limit the risk of irreconcilable decisions, which is a reason for withholding recognition or an order for enforcement by virtue of Article 27(3) of the Convention.
16 With regard in particular to Article 21, the Court observed in the judgment in Gubisch, cited above, that that provision, together with Article 22 on related actions, is contained in Section 8 of Title II of the Convention, which is intended, in the interests of the proper administration of justice within the Community, to prevent parallel proceedings before the courts of different Contracting States and to avoid conflicts between decisions which might result therefrom. Those rules are therefore designed to preclude, in so far as possible and from the outset, the possibility of a situation arising such as that referred to in Article 27(3), that is to say the non-recognition of a judgment on account of its irreconcilability with a judgment given in proceedings between the same parties in the State in which recognition is sought. It follows that, in order to achieve those aims, Article 21 must be interpreted broadly so as to cover, in principle, all situations of lis pendens before courts in Contracting States, irrespective of the parties' domicile.
20 In that connection, it must be observed in the first place that nothing in the documents before the Court suggests that the main proceedings fall within an exclusive head of jurisdiction laid down in the Convention, in particular in Article 16 thereof. The Court' s ruling does not, therefore, have to cover cases in which the court second seised has such exclusive jurisdiction.
22 It appears from the report of the committee of experts which drafted the Convention (Official Journal 1979 C 59, p. 1) that that rule was introduced so that the parties would not have to institute new proceedings if, for example, the court first seised of the matter were to decline jurisdiction. However, the objective of the provision, which is to avoid negative conflicts of jurisdiction, may be achieved without the court second seised examining the jurisdiction of another court.
23 Moreover, it should be noted that in no case is the court second seised in a better position than the court first seised to determine whether the latter has jurisdiction. Either the jurisdiction of the court first seised is determined directly by the rules of the Convention, which are common to both courts and may be interpreted and applied with the same authority by each of them, or it is derived, by virtue of Article 4 of the Convention, from the law of the State of the court first seised, in which case that court is undeniably better placed to rule on the question of its own jurisdiction.
24 Moreover, the cases in which a court in a Contracting State may review the jurisdiction of a court in another Contracting State are set out exhaustively in Article 28 and the second paragraph of Article 34 of the Convention. Those cases are limited to the stage of recognition or enforcement and relate only to certain rules of special or exclusive jurisdiction having a mandatory or public-policy nature. It follows that, apart from those limited exceptions, the Convention does not authorize the jurisdiction of a court to be reviewed by a court in another Contracting State.
26 The answer to the second and third questions submitted by the national court must therefore be that, without prejudice to the case where the court second seised has exclusive jurisdiction under the Convention and in particular under Article 16 thereof, Article 21 of the Convention must be interpreted as meaning that, where the jurisdiction of the court first seised is contested, the court second seised may, if it does not decline jurisdiction, only stay the proceedings and may not itself examine the jurisdiction of the court first seised.