The civil procedural enforcement of EU law - procedural - autonomy of the member states?

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Malte Kramme
• Subject Area: Private Law
• Term: from 2018 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 410110353

The civil procedural protection of individual rights is largely not harmonized throughout the European Union, and thus follows the rules of the respective Member States' procedural laws, even when EU law is enforced. This leads to conflicts between the relevant legal positions of EU law (in particular but not only in the area of consumer protection) and the procedural rules of the Member States. The European Court of Justice solves such conflicts by reference to two principles: Procedural rules of a Member State restricting the enforcement of EU law must not be less favourable than those governing similar domestic actions (principle of equivalence), and may not be framed in such a way as to make it in practice impossible or excessively difficult to exercise the rights conferred by EU law (principle of effectiveness). However, since these principles have been developed in other contexts, there is a lack of clear criteria for determining where the procedural autonomy of the Member States ends and how exactly the EU law influences the procedural law beyond this point.The aim of the proposed project is therefore to outline the effects of EU law on individual judicial redress in a more precise manner.The starting point of the study is the hypothesis that there is a correlation of the functions of individual judicial redress and procedural autonomy of the Member States. Thus, conflicts between EU law and national civil procedural law are related to different functions assigned to individual judicial redress: while from the perspective of national law, law enforcement and conflict resolution are regarded as primary functions of individual judicial redress , from the point of view of EU law, individual judicial redress serves also as a mechanism to pursue policy goals of public interest.The first sub-goal of the project is to verify or to invalidate this hypothesis. Whether such a correlation or even a causal relationship exists, shall be disclosed by an analysis of procedural rules of national law (German law and selected legal systems of other EU Member States) and of EU law on four procedural issues. For this purpose, an analysis model specially developed for the project will be applied.On the basis of the results obtained, a European model on functions of civil proceedings shall be drafted which, in particular, balances the conflict-resolution function with the steering function. On this basis, the principle of effectiveness and equivalence should be refined in a suitable manner for civil proceedings.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Austria