European Property Rights and Wrongs - Diana Wallis MEP

equired was for the Court of Appeal in Florence to hear that a Belgian Judge gave
the decision and that the decision was valid and recognised by the Italian Court.
The EUROJURIS network enabled us to take an interesting approach here, rather
than handing over the Belgian decision to my client and saying ‘well, now you
get on with it, you go and deal with this in Italy’, rather than doing that, we were
able to offer the client some continuity, by sending the file to my counterpart in
Florence. Networking enables us to deal with one of the main obstacles faced; we
managed to simplify the ways in which information can be accessed and allowed
access to justice for the citizen of a Member State when a decision needs to be
enforced in another Member State. This communication and this access to information
enable us to promote and guarantee exchanges between companies from
different Member States. If this wasn’t possible, the legal maze that the company
in question would have to go through, may well produce a significant block on
investment and contracts being signed in various Member States.
The second example relates to a Belgian who had purchased property in Spain.
His wife was Belgian as well and they were married under the regime of shared
ownership of goods. In this instance he hadn’t got his wife to sign the purchase
contract. When he got home he found that his wife wasn’t particularly happy
with this purchase of property in Spain, so the cancellation of the contract became
the issue. Under the Brussels I Regulation, the dispute comes under the
jurisdiction of the Spanish Courts, particularly the Court of Figueras.
The major difficulty in this kind of issue relates to checking the solutions that apply
in Belgian civil law, and checking whether they are compatible with Spanish
civil law, and more particularly with Catalan civil law, because there are specific
rules relating to the purchase contract in Catalonia. Spanish law is essentially compatible
with Belgian law in this, because the agreement of the spouse is essential
under both legislations. But you can imagine for example, if the dispute was to
do with the value of the property, and it is being overvalued, the solution would
not have been so simple, because the rules on annulment on the grounds of
misrepresentation are very different in the two countries, in spite of the fact that
we have relatively similar legal bases in Spain and Belgium. Practically speaking,
the fact that we had a network of professionals working with the same vision,
and in accordance with the same quality standards enabled us to anticipate these
problems and sometimes enables us to avoid court cases.
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Linking up national Land Law systems