Ostalo
Croatian Judicial Practice in Disputes with an International Element
Ivo Grbin
; sudac Vrhovnog suda Republike Hrvatske u mirovini
Sažetak
In modern times, there is an increasing number of legal relations that have to do with more than one country and for many reasons include an international element. In situations including this element, numerous legal issues occur, which would not appear otherwise. They are of substantive and procedural legal nature and they refer to e.g.: resolving the dilemma whether domestic or foreign law should be used as the applicable law in a particular case; the legal status of foreigners; jurisdiction; international jurisdiction; insurance of legal expenses and recognition of foreign court decisions. In the Republic of Croatia, this entire subject matter has been regulated in detail with the wholehearted help of the jurisprudence in the form of numerous laws and there are also many multilateral and bilateral international agreements addressing the subject. In view of all of the above, one would expect that regarding the disputes of international character a rich judicial practice would evolve. This, however, did not happen. Judicature indeed exists, but it could not be described as opulent. This is mostly due to the following reasons:
- cases in which international character is prominent are an exception in relation to other cases that appear before the courts;
- most of the cases with international element are not in the least bit different from those where it is not present because its presence is legally irrelevant. Then the court generally acts and decides the same as when the legal relation is limited exclusively to inland. In these cases courts often disregard the foreign element when making decisions, although sometimes they should take it into account, because the circumstance that in a particular case it is not relevant, is not always clear and indisputable in itself;
- both the court ant the parties tend to apply national law under which they live and act and which is more or less familiar to them. Although the rules regulating the situations with international element are a part of the national law, they sometimes point to the application of foreign law which the litigants should study first, and this regularly means a path into uncertainty, so their occasional attempts to find reasons to decide in compliance with the law of their own state, even when they should apply foreign law, are rather understandable but not justified.
Although the decisions dealing with situations of international character are not numerous, they gathered up to such a number that they couldn't have been included in this paper due to limited space, so I was unfortunately forced to eliminate most of them and leave only some, more particularly those from the international private law. The decisions are presented intact, as they were published in various legal publications and they are organized according to the provisions of legal sources applied in them. Next to every court decision, the publication in which it was published is specified.
Ključne riječi
international element; private international law; international civil procedural law; conflict of laws; application of foreign law
Hrčak ID:
93096
URI
Datum izdavanja:
3.5.2012.
Posjeta: 2.604 *