FORUM NON CONVENIENS IN ENGLISH JUDICIAL PRACTICE AND EUROPEAN UNION LAW
FORUM NON CONVENIENS IN ENGLISH JUDICIAL PRACTICE AND EUROPEAN UNION LAW

Summary/Abstract: Forum non conveniens is a legal doctrine used in countries that subscribe to the common law tradition. It relates to the issue of international jurisdiction of a court and signifies a discretionary power of a court to refuse to hear a proceeding brought before it for which it would otherwise be authorised to hear, when it ascertains that there is another, foreign court that is more appropriate to hear and deliberate on the proceeding. There are two basic presuppositions for the application of this doctrine. First is that the proceeding in question is one for which there is a concurrent jurisdiction of courts from at least two countries, and the other is that the court to which the proceeding is filed does possess a discretionary right to decide on its own jurisdiction. The doctrine of forum non conveniens, which incidentally originates from Scottish law, has been first and foremost accepted and developed by the US and England, followed by other common law countries. It is an integral part of legal systems of these countries and is part of their national rules on international jurisdiction of courts. Seeing that Great Britain acceded to the Brussels Convention on Jurisdiction and the Enforcement of Judgments in Civil and Commercial Matters of 1968 that regulates these issues between European Union member countries and does not envisage application of this theory, the question was raised as to whether English courts can use this national rule still and in what cases. Decisions of English courts expressed diametrically different views on these issues until 2005 when the European Court of Justice in the case of Owusu gave its final answer to this question which says that the doctrine forum non conveniens may not be implemented not even in cases when the alternative forum is a court of a state that is not a member of the European Union. A detailed chronological analysis of all of these factors is the subject of this paper.

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