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... solutions from Polish civil procedures to EU provisions”

A Polish court, like any Member State court may consider itself inappropriate for settling a dispute between a Polish entrepreneur and an entrepreneur in another EU country, if four conditions are met. The first two are positive: the defendant is domiciled in a Member State and has been sued in a Polish court. The other two are negative conditions: the defendant raises a plea of lack of jurisdiction and relevance of the Polish court and the jurisdiction does not arise from Council Regulation No. 44/2001 of 22 December 2000, on jurisdiction and recognition and enforcement of judgments in civil and commercial cases (hereinafter: Council Regulation).

These particular conditions were present, in the case of defendant, Z, a French company and client of Wardyński & Partners. A Polish company, X, filed a claim in the Regional Court in Gliwice against company Z. Instead of filing the lawsuit under terms of general jurisdiction to the court in the country in which the defendant was based, the company filed it with the court, for the region which, in its view, the contract should have been performed. It claimed an award of about EUR 60,000, as this was the apparent unpaid amount for goods sold to the French company, together with capitalised interest.

According to Polish regulations, the place of performance of the contract is, among others, the headquarters of the bank in which the creditor holds an account. The Polish company, in requesting the Polish court to settle the dispute, referred to the principle which determines this in Article 34 of the Civil Procedure Code, in conjunction with Article 454 of the Civil Code. However, the Council Regulation has a different resolution for this issue of the place of performance of the obligation and the jurisdiction of the court for settling any arising dispute.

“The concepts used in the Council Regulation must be interpreted autonomously: independently of their importance under the national laws of individual Member States,” explains adwokat Marcin Radwan-Röhrenschef. This Regulation assigns the place of performance of an obligation arising from a sale of movables as the Member State where the movables have been delivered or should have been delivered under the contract. In contrast to Polish law, the Council Regulation allows for one location for the performance of a sale contract, as opposed to separate locations for each of the mutual transactions.

Goods produced by the Polish company, had always been sent by it to France. So the place of performance of the contract was a French town. This means that the Polish company could not insist on the case being tried by a Polish court. Therefore, the Regional Court in Katowice rejected the claim.

It was unable to issue any other decision. The essence of the legal act which is the Council Regulation is that its provisions have absolute precedence over the provisions of domestic law, including the Civil Procedure Code.