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skönsmässigt beslutsfattande i processrättsliga frågor

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rules. Thus, fourthly, the development towards increased elements of

discretion furthers the Europeanization of civil procedure, in the sense

that the procedural obligations of national courts are to a larger extent

determined on Union, and to a lesser extent on national, level. This is,

as in the case of judicialization described above, likely to affect the decision-making

process and possibly also the reasoning and even the substance

of the decision. In this way, Europeanization affects the kind of

judicalization taking place.

Europeanization also has an impact on the other consequences discussed

above. It counteracts the decentralizing effect by a sort of recentralization,

from the multitude of national courts to the CJEU. Thereby

decentralization gradually turns into a transferral of power between two

centrally placed authorities: from the national parliament to the Union

judiciary. As the increasing case law from the Court also limits the room

for discretion of the national courts, the increased European influence

also lessens the risk of inter-procedural fragmentation. It does not, however,

decrease the risk or degree of intra-procedural fragmentation; if

anything, it strengthens it partly by consolidating and institutionalising

such discrepancies, partly by introducing new norms for particular procedural

issues without insight in how this affects the national procedure

as a whole.

In sum, the thesis argues that the ongoing development towards

increasing judicial discretion in Swedish civil procedure causes the control

of procedure to be transferred from the political to the judicial power

sphere, where it is both distributed between the national courts and

transferred from the national to the supranational level. An effect of this

is that the opportunities to make procedural decisions based on a holistic

understanding of the functions of civil procedure are reduced, and that

the possible impact of EU law on both procedural and substantive law is

enhanced.

Two concluding remarks

First remark: On the integration of EU and national law

In Sweden, as presumably in most other European jurisdictions, the interest

in a “correct” outcome in substance is not considered to outweigh the

interest in a fair trial. In cases such as van Schijndel, however, the Court

seems to have been relying solely on the interest in the full effectiveness

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