Party Autonomy in International Property Law - Peace Palace Library

C. Developments and Prospects in Europe and in European Law Projects
Member States of the EU to other areas of the world amounted to 1.310
billion EURO, and the total value of imports into the European Union
came to 1.565 billion EURO. However, even greater was the volume of
merchandise and of semi-finished and finished goods that were moved
in the internal market across national borders to another Member State:
the value of imports from other Member States amounted to 2.639 billion
EURO, and that of exports to other Member States came to 2.714
billion EURO. 3 These are truly imposing figures, and may give an idea of
the values that are the main but not even the only objects of European
conflict rules on movable property.
The vast majority of these transactions involve payment obligations.
Many of these monetary obligations are secured by proprietary security
in favour of the seller. A considerable number of court decisions in all
European countries have dealt with retentions of title in imported goods.
However, some major trans-border transactions have also been financed
by banks and other credit institutions; in these cases, security rights other
than retention of title have been employed, and again the issue of recognition
has arisen when the goods involved were shipped to an EU Member
State.
Security rights in monetary claims and security rights in aircraft and ships
are excluded from the present study; the former because they are dealt
with broadly by A. Flessner 4 and by Verhagen and van Dongen 5 , and the
latter because of their very special features.
Before going into technical detail, it is useful to briefly inquire into the
practical demand for reliable rules in this field. In the framework of an EU
Study on the interaction of contract and property law, businessmen and
legal practitioners had been asked about their practical experiences. The
summary of their replies represents their response:
‘All the answers, irrespective of trade or country, complained about
the difficulties in relation to credit securities in the cross-border circulation
of business transactions … To compound matters, there is a lack
3
Eurostat Datenbank Comext. DS-016890-EU27 Trade since 1995, Jan.-Dec.
2008.
4
Infra, Chapter 10.
5
Infra, Chapter 9, n. 1.
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Ulrich Drobnig
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