EU to "clarify" parallelism of jurisdiction rules

The European Union's Council Decision of 27 November 2008 concerning the conclusion of the Convention on jurisdiction and the recognition and enforcement of judgments in civil and commercial matters has been published today on the website of the Official Journal.

This Decision addresses parallelism between the Brussels and Lugano Convention regimes on jurisdiction and on recognition and enforcement of judgments in civil and commercial matters and declares that the rules of the Lugano Convention should be aligned with the rules of Regulation 44/2001 (which modernised the rules of the Brussels Convention and made the system of recognition and enforcement swifter and more efficient) in order to achieve the same level of circulation of judgments between the EU Member States and the EFTA States. Annex I of the Decision states:

"DECLARATION BY THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY

‘The European Community hereby declares that, when amending Council Regulation (EC) No 44/2001 on jurisdiction, recognition and enforcement of judgments in civil and commercial matters, it intends to clarify the scope of Article 22(4) of the said Regulation with a view to taking into account the relevant case law of the Court of Justice of the European Communities with respect to proceedings concerned with the registration or validity of intellectual property rights, thereby ensuring its parallelism with Article 22(4) of the Convention while taking into account the results of the evaluation of the application of Regulation (EC) No 44/2001".

For the record, Article 22(4) of the Regulation currently provides as follows:

"In proceedings concerned with the registration or validity of patents, trade marks, designs, or other similar rights required to be deposited or registered, the courts of the Member State in which the deposit or registration has been applied for, has taken place or is under the terms of a Community instrument or an international convention deemed to have taken place.

Without prejudice to the jurisdiction of the European Patent Office under the Convention on the Grant of European Patents, signed at Munich on 5 October 1973, the courts of each Member State shall have exclusive jurisdiction, regardless of domicile, in proceedings concerned with the registration or validity of any European patent granted for that State".