If you listen to the xenophobes of the UKIP (better known as the EXP - the English Xenophobe Party), you would imagine that Europe was taking over the UK and nothing could be decided locally either in the UK or in any of the other nation states that comprise the European Union.
For some of us, such as myself, these national boundaries are nothing more than a pain in the neck that get in the way when things need doing which cross borders.
In the past week, this has affected me directly again - much to my frustration!
As regular readers will know, I am pursuing small claims against companies in France (JTI Development) and Belgium (2BTranslated) who owe me €1,498.67 and €1,296.05 respectively.
As regular readers will also know, I am using a European Parliament Directive (or was) no. 861/2007 to pursue these claims. A self-employed individual in one EU country trying to get money from delinquent payers in other EU countries. You would imagine such legal proceedings and competence to cover such would cross borders, right?
When you fill in the form you would imagine this to be the case. There is a series of boxes which you can fill in indicating where you want the case to be assessed. One of them is the country in which the claimant is resident. As the box exists and can be ticked off, you would imagine that you can pursue the claim in that country, right?
Last Tuesday, 7 weeks (!!!!) after they received the complaints (containing 65 pages of documentation that took 2 days to put together with every detail checked for accuracy), I got a letter from the Amtsgericht Frankfurt (the court responsible for legal matters in civil cases) indicating that they were not "competent to deal with the matter".
I had to arrange a (fortunately free) consultation with the legal advisory service at the court yesterday to check this out. Apparently according to a legal reference (which the person offering the advice could not find in any appropriate textbook or or any Internet site), the court in Germany does not have the necessary jurisdiction to deal with companies outside its borders, even if the wronged party on the receiving end of the delinquency is resident in that country.
Which means 7 weeks wasted. Which means having to pursue the matter in the courts in the country of the delinquent companies. Which sounds like the advantage if anything is with the miscreant rather than the wronged party. Certainly if what I was reading yesterday on the Internet is owt to go by, the process in the Flanders area of Belgium is going to be difficult to win. France looked somewhat more balanced, but ....
No doubt the EXP and its awful leader Nigel Farage (also a great admirer, apparently, of the awful Margaret Thatcher - people turning to the EXP as an alternative to the rotting major parties in the UK, be warned. If you think what you have got now is bad!) will be cheering like crazy. A great chance to rip off all these nasty foreigners. We know our law better than they do. Yee-ha!
Meanwhile the need for a neutral and fair method to deal with claims such as this crossing European borders becomes ever more obvious. Forcing claimants to "play away" on potentially unfriendly territory is hardly the road to go. The Directive above looked a step in the right direction. Unfortunately it still has a long way to go if it is to be applied fairly.
And how much longer will this take? Instead of expecting over 2,000 Euro in the next couple of weeks, I am stuck with a bank balance standing at around 30 Euro - because two firms have not paid me what I should have been paid, and the legislative rules in place make it very difficult to get at them, clearly, fairly and punctually. This is justice?
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