Overseas Chambers of Peter Harris

Overseas Chambers
c/o Addington Chambers
160, Fleet Street,
London EC4A 2DQ,
United Kingdom
https://addingtonchambers.com

Fellow of the European Law Institute Vienna
https://overseaschambers.com/
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the Bar Standards Board
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The inadequate level of response from Your Europe Advice on the British aspects of the Succession Regulation has been recognised

April 26th 2016

Thanks to the intervention of the European Parliament in June 2015, the Commission has recognised the inadequacy of the legal position published by Your Europe Advice on the particularly British and English aspects of the non-application of the Succession Regulation n°650/2012.  Please see prior postings on this point.

The inadequate level of response to British enquiries on the Succession Regulation by Your Europe Advice  has been raised by the Legal Services Directorate of the European Parliament with the Commission.  The reason was that Your Europe Advice is supervised by the EU Commission who has responsibility for it.  The problem is that Your Europe has taken it upon itself to advise European lawyers and notaries dealing with these issues inadequately, and without full reference to the English legal principles involved.

One response from this Panel was to avoid the issues, by advising the enquirer to lobby their MP for the United Kingdom to accede to the Regulation.

To be clear Your Europe is made up of a panel of some sixty odd lawyers nominated by the Commission.

The written response came from Věra Jourova, stamped 23rd July, 2015, but only received by the Parliament  in 2016. I have a copy, but not yet an official one. In sum the response was "it's complicated....." Of course it is, that is why Your Europe's attempts to comment upon matters of English law in absolute ignorance was totally wrong.

Those in Europe and in the UK who placed reliance upon this Panel, may need to review their position.

I refer particulary to the abuse by Your Europe of correspondence betwwen Lord McNally, who should have known better and Sir Roger Gale MEP, who could also have checked it, resulting in an abject failure of the Ministry of Justice to analyse its own laws and apply them correctly.  The manner in which that error was then propagated by the Your Europe Advice Panel as law, rather than a political position throughout Europe was exponential.

More to follow next week ....