Opinion of Mr Advocate General Mancini

Mr President,

Members of the Court,

1. Article 31 of the Convention of 27 September 1968 on Jurisdiction and Enforcement of Judgments in Civil and Commercial Matters provides that: A judgment given in a Contracting State and enforceable in that State shall be enforced in another ... State when, on the application of any interested party, the order for its enforcement has been issued there. The first paragraph of Article 33 provides: The procedure for making the application shall be governed by the law of the State in which enforcement is sought, and the second paragraph continues: The applicant must give an address for service of process within the area of jurisdiction of the court applied to. However, if the law of the State in which enforcement is sought does not provide for the furnishing of such an address, ... [he] shall appoint a representative ad litem.

2. Written observations were submitted by the appellant in the main proceedings, the Commission of the European Communities, the Federal Republic of Germany and the United Kingdom. Two arguments are adduced. According to the Commission and Mr Carron, the duty to give an address for service and the enforcement proceedings of which that duty is a part are governed by Community law. A national court cannot therefore apply its own procedural rules without jeopardizing the uniformity of those proceedings. Furthermore, the requirements of simplicity and speed which underlie the provisions of the Convention mean that the address for service of process should normally be given when the application for enforcement is made; an applicant who fails to do so thus frustrates the whole procedure, to his own detriment.

3. The argument of the appellant and the Commission cannot be accepted. It should be pointed out that, in view of the considerable safeguards enjoyed by the defendant in the substantive proceedings, the authors of the Convention thought it equitable to confer on a party wishing to enforce a judgment in his favour the benefit of a speedy procedure in which the debtor would be precluded from raising fresh objections and the court's role would be limited to considering issues of public policy. To that end, no reference was allowed to the procedure of the State in which enforcement was sought (which does not always confer on the creditor the advantages mentioned above), and it was decided to adopt a common system. The system chosen from amongst the various possibilities under consideration was the one based on an application by the successful party, precisely because it enables the court to give a ruling on the basis of the documents supplied by him, without hearing the other party.

4. In view of the foregoing considerations I propose that the Court should give the following answer to the questions referred to it by the Hof van Cassatie in its order of 14 June 1982 in the proceedings between Mr Carrón and the Federal Republic of Germany:

1 Translated from the Italian.