Legal academia and practicing lawyers should be connected very tightly, and interchanges between these two poles are very necessary and urgent nowadays. That is why Jurvneshservice lawyers participated in one of the biggest conferences ever organized by academics – How European is European Private International Law? – held in Berlin on 2d and 3d of March 2018.
As organizers stated in the introduction to the conference program, over the course of the last decades the European legislature has adopted a total of 18 Regulations in the area of private international law (including civil procedure). The resulting substantial degree of legislative unification has been described as the first true Europeanisation of private international law and even as a kind of “European Choice of Law Revolution”. However, until today it is largely unclear whether the far-reaching unification of the “law on the books” has turned private international law into a truly European “law in action”. So, the main objective of the Conference was to answer the following questions: To what extent is European private international law actually based on uniform European rules common to all Member States rather than on state treaties or instruments of enhanced cooperation? Is the way academics and practitioners analyze and interpret European private international law really different from previously existing domestic approaches to private international law? Or is the actual application and interpretations of European private international law rather still influenced or even dominated by national legal traditions, leading to defragmentation of a supposedly uniform body of law?
The conference aimed at gathering scholars to give responses to those questions.
The conference schedule contained speeches concerning the sources of European private international law and their relationship with other international instruments and the domestic laws of the EU member states; application of that laws in the courts of the EU member states; and problems of legal education, especially private international law education in the EU.
Among the issues thoroughly discussed were the possibilities of creation of a general instrument of private international law (so-called Rome 0 Regulation) and a strong necessity to manage the challenge of lack of knowledge of private international law among judges and practitioners (though there was a discussion on ways how to do it).
Jurvneshservice partner, Doctor of Laws Gennadii Tsirat, and Kateryna Tsirat participated in the conference where they represented Ukraine and Ukrainian juridical science. Together with the European colleagues, they sought answers to the above-stated questions both for the EU and Ukraine that, we believe, should look for creating an international instrument regulating private international law issues between the EU and Ukrainian citizens.
Gennadii and Kateryna Tsirat had a great opportunity to meet personally with the organizers of the conference, namely prof. Jürgen Basedow, the emeritus of Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law and prof. Giesela Rühl, as well as other prominent academics – Gilles Cuniberti, Giuditta Cordero-Moss, Thomas Kadner Graziano, Pedro de Miguel Asensio, and many others.
