Thursday, April 02, 2009

This Week in Luxembourg

Triple word score for the repeated use of the word peripatetic in this 234 case: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:62007J0523:EN:HTML. The main question here is how to ascertain the children's habitual residence for the purposes of deciding who has jurisdiction to remove them from their parents' care, given their peripatetic lifestyle (meaning that they are probably travellers). I suspect the Finnish court will decide it has jurisdiction.

- More and more people seem to be having fun with the concept of "serious difficulties" in competition law, which provides a way for third parties to appeal the Commission's decision not to investigate further. Last month there was a CFI ruling on the Belgian Postal Industry and an AG opinion on something complicated and Danish. Now there is a case on French Telecoms. (Out of these three, DHL won in the first case, the AG recommended that the plaintiff did not have standing in the second, and Bouyges Telecom lost on the merits in today's case, as it did before the CFI.)

- In February the ECJ limited the ability of UK courts to impose anti-suit injunctions in the West Tankers case. In today's art. 234 ruling in Gambazzi, there may be a problem with a UK court decision debarring the defendant from a civil case for failure to comply with various disclosure orders. The ECJ ruled that, if they want to, the Italian court may refuse to enforce the resulting default judgement for public policy reasons.

- This Turkish company applied, under art. 44 Statute, for revision of an earlier ECJ order dismissing their appeal as manifestly inadmissible/unfounded. Their application was declared inadmissible: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:62006J0255:EN:HTML. (It's not very interesting why. This case is just a procedural oddity.)

- A nice example of piercing the corporate veil in Community law, in order to examine whether two companies are independent or not: Glückauf Brauerei.

- From the CFI: For obvious reasons, the CFI upheld OHIM's decision not to register Ultimate Fighting Championship as a trademark. http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:62006A0118:EN:HTML.

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