Agrégateur de flux

The Mexican Academy of Private International and Comparative Law (AMEDIP) will be holding its XLII Seminar entitled “Towards an International Judicial Law ” at the Escuela Judicial del Estado de México in Toluca (Mexico) from 13 to 15 November 2019.

The seminar will focus on the draft National Code of Civil and Family Procedure and the draft National Law on Private International Law. The latter is an initiative of AMEDIP and has been drafted by professors Dr. Leonel Pereznieto Castro, Dr. Jorge Alberto Silva and Lic. Virginia Aguilar. These are two significant pieces of legislation and the seminar will analise how they would interact if they were passed by the Mexican Congress.

Potential speakers are invited to submit a paper in Spanish, English or Portuguese by 5 July 2019. Papers must comply with the criteria established by AMEDIP and will be evaluated accordingly. Selected speakers will be required to give their presentations preferably in Spanish as there will be no interpretation services but some exceptions may be made by the organisers upon request.

The final programme of the seminar will be made available at the end of October.

There is a registration fee of 300 Mexican pesos (approx. 14 Euros) for students and 800 Mexican pesos (approx. 37 Euros) for the general public. For speakers, the organisers will provide transportation from Mexico City and will cover hotel costs in Toluca.

For more detailed information (incl. convocation), see www.amedip.org.   Any queries, as well as registration requests, may be directed to asistencia@amedip.org.

Many thanks to the staff at Leuven’s law library for writing up six extremely useful Google ‘hacks’ for legal research, which I am pleased to post as a guest blog.

 

As law librarians of KU Leuven, we help students and professionals with their research on a daily basis. A big part of research is – of course – Google, but for some topics and broad searches, Google will come up with 2 million relevant results, making it hard to see the forest for the trees. These six hacks will help you Google more efficiently and find what you’re looking for quicker.

The most commonly known hack – but also one of the most useful ones to alleviate research frustration – is the ‘search within a site’ hack. By typing site:[the website you want to search in] before or after your keywords, you will only get results from within that particular site. This is especially useful for websites with limited or difficult native search tools.

As for our second hack, we would like to remind you of the wildcard: *. Using the asterisk to find missing words is useful if you would like to look up a quote but do not remember the exact wording. The wildcard has another great use: you can easily include words in two different spellings in your search results by searching, for example, organi*ations.

Another way to look up quotes, this time if you do have the exact wording and are trying to find out the source, is by putting your words between quotation marks. This hack will make sure you only get results that quote the exact phrase you’re searching.

Our fourth Google hack is one to help you filter out particular words. By using the – or hyphen symbol directly in front of said word, you will get results that do not include it. The hyphen symbol is essentially the same as the Boolean “NOT”.

Let’s say you know a specific file is available online, but your basic keyword search does not turn it up? To solve this problem, use our fifth hack: the filtype:[filetype you’re looking for, eg. doc] string in combination with your keywords.

Last but not least, our final hack will make it easier to search for different aspects of law from a specific country. By using the site:[country code] string, you only turn up results with URL’s that have the specific country code you are looking for as a domain extension. This works, for example, to help you search more efficiently for fields of law in the Netherlands vs Belgium.

These six hacks are easy tricks to level up your research skills and make sure you do not spend as much time combing through pages of Google results. There is definitely more where this came from! For specific questions, involving Google or not, the librarians at the KU Leuven Libraries Law are always at your service.

(These hacks were originally posted in the context of a “Google hacks week” on the KU Leuven Libraries Law’s different social media platforms: Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.)

La chambre criminelle rejette le pourvoi dans lequel le requérant invoquait le défaut de motivation de la peine de travail d’intérêt général au regard de sa situation personnelle. En effet, le prononcé d’une telle peine étant subordonné à l’accord préalable de l’intéressé, il implique nécessairement la prise en compte de la gravité des faits, de la personnalité de leur auteur et de la situation personnelle de celui-ci.

en lire plus

The latest issue of ZEuP has just been released. It features the following articles:

Christoph Teichmann/Andrea Götz: Metamorphosen des Europäischen Gesellschaftsrechts: SUP, Company Law Package und SPE 2.0

So far, European initiatives aimed at facilitating the regulatory framework for limited-liability companies, such as the SPE-Regulation and the SUP-Directive, have failed. Their failure, however, has fostered a deeper understanding of the regulatory issues. The authors illustrate this achievement by analysing the long and winding road of the SUP proposal. It paved the way for the “Company Law Package” (regarding digitalization) and it may even contribute to an updated SPE version (“SPE 2.0”).

Christian Schmitt/Julia Bhatti/Christian Storck: Die neue europäische Prospekt-Verordnung – ein großer Wurf?

The new EU Prospectus Regulation attempts at solving the conflict between investor protection and the opening of the capital market. It is an attempt to provide investors with clearer prospectus information, while making access to the capital markets easier for companies. However, new requirements will also create additional liability risks. The overall picture shows that although the Regulation does not represent a revolution, it does offer potential for an evolution of the EU prospectus regime.

John Bowers/ACL Davies/Ruth Dukes/Mark Freedland/Birke Häcker: Sir Otto Kahn-Freund QC (1900–1979): A Retrospective

The present contribution contains the presentations delivered at a symposium held in honour of Sir Otto Kahn-Freund QC at the University of Oxford. Kahn-Freund was a German labour lawyer from a Jewish family who emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1933. He became a founding father of modern British labour law and held professorships at the London School of Economics and the University of Oxford. 2019 marks the fortieth anniversary of his death.

Rosa Miquel Sala: Das Sechste Buch des katalanischen Zivilgesetzbuches: neues Kaufrecht unter europäischem Einfluss

The Sixth Book of the Catalan Civil Code has been in force since the 1st of January 2018, a decision of the Spanish Constitutional Court is pending. The new Book contains an exhaustive regulation of sales contracts following the European models. A modernisation of the law of obligations in the Spanish Civil Code taking into consideration the existing projects and maybe also the new Catalan rules should follow. Equally urgent is an amendment of the rules on intra-state conflicts of laws.

 

Dégradation et détérioration - Cour d'assise - Chose jugée

Atteinte à la dignité de la personne

Sécurité sociale, assurances sociales des travailleurs indépendants des professions non agricoles

Sécurité sociale, accident du travail

Sécurité sociale, accident du travail

Sécurité sociale, accident du travail

Sécurité sociale, accident du travail

Sécurité sociale

Cour d'assise - Chose jugée

Sécurité sociale, assurances sociales du régime général

Sécurité sociale

As noted, I have come up for some air after a few hectic weeks – next case to report on is [2019] EWHC 879 (Comm) Ramona v Reliantco, held 12 April. (A similar case is pending with the CJEU against Reliantco as Case C-500/18).

Defendant (‘Reliantco’) is a company incorporated in Cyprus offering financial products and services through an online trading platform under the ‘UFX’ trade name. Claimant, Ms Ang, is an individual of substantial means who invested in Bitcoin futures, on a leveraged basis, through the UFX platform. She claims, essentially and primarily, that Reliantco wrongfully blocked and terminated her UFX account and should compensate her for the loss of her open Bitcoin positions, or at a minimum should refund her cash value invested. She also makes claims for relief in respect of what she says have been breaches of data protection obligations owed by Reliantco in connection with her UFX account.

The judgment does not concern the merits of Ms Ang’s claims but rather an application by Reliantco challenging jurisdiction. Reliantco contends that Ms Ang is bound by its standard terms and conditions, clause 27.1 of which provides that the courts of Cyprus are to have exclusive jurisdiction over “all disputes and controversies arising out of or in connection with” her customer agreement. Reliantco therefore relies on Article 25 Brussels Ia.

Ms Ang says that clause 27.1 is ineffective to require her to bring her claim in Cyprus, either because she is a consumer within Section 4 of Brussels (Recast) or because clause 27.1 was not incorporated into her UFX customer agreement with Reliantco in such a way as to satisfy the requirements of Article 25. Ms Ang says, in the alternative, that her data protection claims may be brought here notwithstanding Article 25 Brussels Ia even if Article 25 applies to her primary substantive claims.

All in all a nice set of jurisdictional issues and no surprise to have prof Jonathan Harris QC involved as counsel.

At all times material to her claim, Ms Ang was not employed or earning a living in any self-employed trade or profession (unless, which is contentious between the parties and considered below, her activity as a customer of Reliantco via the UFX platform is itself to be so classified). Ms Ang worked in money markets for two months as a trainee, observing US$/DM currency swaps. Other than that, she has no professional currency trading or money market experience (again, that is, unless her use of the UFX platform to invest in Bitcoin futures itself counts as such).

At 9, s little bit of Bitcoin drame enters the scene: Ms Ang’s husband, Craig Wright, is a computer scientist with cybersecurity and blockchain expertise who works as Chief Scientist for nChain Ltd, a blockchain technology company with a corporate vision “to transform how the world conducts all transactions – using the blockchain’s distributed, decentralised ledger that chronologically records transactions in an immutable way“. As a researcher, he publishes prolifically and has developed innovations for which patent protection has been sought. He is the same Craig Wright who has identified himself publicly as being ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’, the online pseudonym associated with the inventor (or a co-inventor) of Bitcoin. Baker J holds that he need not consider whether that claim is true, and on the evidence for this application I would not be in any position to do so.

 

Was Ms Ang a ‘consumer’? At 52 ff the arguments of Reliantco are summarised; at 55 ff those of Ms Ang.

CJEU precedent discussed by Baker J is C-89/91 Shearson; C-269/95 Benincasa; C-464/01 Gruber; C-498/16 Schrems; and the pending cases C‑208/18 Petruchová [I reviewed the AG’s Opinion (issued a day before the High Court’s judgment) yesterday] and C-500/18 Reliantco Investments and Reliantco Investments Limassol Sucursala Bucureşti.

Baker J concludes at 34 ‘the ECJ/CJEU has not decided whether contracts entered into by a wealthy private individual for the purpose of investing her wealth, or particular types of such contract, are not (or can never be) consumer contracts.’

Reference is then made to English precedent along the very lines of the precedent dismissed by Tanchev AG in Petruchová: including AMT Futures v Marzillier, and at 35 ff Standard Bank London Ltd v Apostolakis both through the English and the Greek courts – with differing results. At 44: ‘the disagreement between the English and Greek decisions in Apostolakis turns upon and is constituted by a difference of view as to whether investing private wealth for gain, if it takes the form of buying and selling foreign currency, is by nature a business activity so that an individual investing their wealth in that way cannot when doing so be a ‘consumer’ under Brussels (Recast). Longmore J thought there was no such proposition of law; the Greek court took the contrary view.’ German case-law is also discussed.

At 63 Baker J comes to the core of his reasoning: ‘In my judgment, the investment by a private individual of her personal surplus wealth (i.e. surplus to her immediate needs), in the hope of generating good returns (whether in the form of income on capital, capital growth, or a mix of the two), is not a business activity, generally speaking. It is a private consumption need, in the sense I believe intended by the ECJ in Benincasa, to invest such wealth with such an aim, i.e. that is an ‘end user’ purpose for a private individual and is not exclusively a business activity. That means, as was also Popplewell J’s conclusion in AMT v Marzillier, that it will be a fact-specific issue in any given case whether a particular individual was indeed contracting as a private individual to satisfy that need, i.e. as a consumer, or was doing so for the purpose of an investment business of hers (existing or planned).’

And at 65 in fine: the ‘question of purpose is the question to be asked, and it must be considered upon all of the evidence available to the court and not by reference to any one part of that evidence in isolation.’

At 68 he concludes ‘the purpose of her contract with Reliantco therefore was outside any business of hers’.

Baker J notes that he was not asked to defer any decision in C‑208/18 Petruchová. I believe it would have been of help to determine the issue before him. Tanchev AG (as noted, in an Opinion not available to Baker J at the time of his drafting his judgment) suggests that ‘to determine whether a person must be regarded as a consumer, reference must be made to the nature and objective of the contract, not to the subjective situation of the person concerned.’ 

 

Obiter, he then reviews Article 25, where CJEU authority discussed is ia Colzanni and Cars on the Web. Ms Ang contended that she was not able to access the standard terms web page at the time she opened her account, and therefore clause 27.1 did not comply with Article 25 B1a. At 78 extensive technical detail is discussed and at 80 Baker J finds that the Cars on the Web criterion of accessibility and durability were met; and at 81 that in any case, the current issue is not one of a click-wrap agreement for a signed hard copy of the GTCs with choice of court in it, had also been sent.

Equally obiter, at 83 ff Baker J summarily discussed the GDPR jurisdictional arguments which would have been more relevant had he not accepted jurisdiction under the consumer title. The brief discussion entirely fulfills my summer 2018 prediciton here: Article 79 GDPR will create a lot of issues at the level of jurisdiction.

A very relevant case.

Geert.

(Handbook of) EU private International Law, 2nd ed. 2016, Chapter 2, Heading 2.2.8.2.

 

 

Inspecteur van de Belastingdienst
Sécurité sociale des travailleurs migrants
Un marin qui conserve sa résidence dans son État membre d’origine, tout en travaillant pour le compte d’un employeur établi dans un autre État membre, sur un navire battant pavillon d’un État tiers et naviguant en dehors du territoire de l’Union européenne, relève du champ d’application du règlement sur la coordination des systèmes de sécurité sociale