From Transnational Principles to European Model Rules of Civil Procedure(European Law Institute/UNIDROIT) — Rules on Collective Redress —

The following article presents the collective redress part of Model Rules which are the result of a joint academic project launched by UNIDROIT and the European Law Institute in Vienna. The project is a follow-on project of “Principles of Transnational Civil Procedure” that were elaborated and adopted by UNIDROIT and the American Law Institute in 2004. The current project, called “From Transnational Principles to European Rules of Civil Procedure” is an attempt to present rules on civil procedure for domestic and cross-border cases in Europe. It is an academic project, supported by the European Commission, which tries to identify converging tendencies in civil procedure across Europe and to develop a set of Model Rules in order to provide a basis for discussion on the further harmonization civil procedure law in Europe. This articles focuses on the collective redress part of the Model Rules. It describes the background of the whole project, and of the chapter on collective redress in particular. It explains the three basic instruments for dealing with mass harm events: collective actions for damages or any other remedy, and mass settlements either negotiated and concluded while a collective action is pending or as a stand-alone proceeding with the main objective to obtain court approval for a mass settlement negotiated out-of-court. In its last part this paper highlights some of the key questions which had to be addressed by the Working Group when drafting the Chapter on collective redress.