INTRODUCTION

In 2006, the European legislator adopted a regulation which established the first common European civil procedure: the European order for payment procedure. By adopting the European Small Claims Regulation in 2007, the European legislator made the next step towards unified rules of European civil procedure. This step is of particular importance as the European Small Claims Regulation contains unified rules for common cases where the claim is contested, whereas the European Order for Payment Regulation only applies to the very specific case of uncontested claims; and contrary to the European Enforcement Order Regulation, the idea is not to transform a national title which stands at the end of a purely national procedure into a European title of enforcement, but rather to adopt unified procedural rules giving the national tribunals the power to issue European judgments which are enforceable in all participating Member States of the European Union without any public policy exception.

The idea for such a procedure was born against the background of disproportionately high costs for cross-border litigation in cases of small claims. The European legislator pursued the objective of guaranteeing simple and swift proceedings at low cost for small claims cases in order to lower the threshold for initiating proceedings.

The success of these efforts were, however, limited (section 2). On the basis of an evaluation of the functioning of the Regulation, the European Commission presented a proposal for a reform at the end of 2013. Finally, at the end of 2015, the European legislator adopted a reform regulation, which has applied since 14 July 2017 (section 3). This reform has slightly changed the basic character of the instrument, which leads to the question whether the Regulation, in its current state, constitutes a foreign body or rather an appropriate puzzle piece within the system of European civil procedure (section 4).

THE ORIGINAL VERSION OF THE REGULATION

SCOPE OF APPLICATION

In its original version, the Regulation only applied to cases where the sum in dispute did not exceed €2,000. This demonstrates that the legislator focused on disputes where at least on one side – from the European Commission's perspective, on the claimant's side – a consumer or a small enterprise was concerned.