Brussels I recast and the south-east Europe
The recast of the Brussels I Regulation on jurisdiction and the recognition and enforcement of judgments in civil and commercial matters arouses interest in the region in terms of both aspects, harmonization of the national legislation with the PIL of EU and its application in the courts of the Member States on matters related to the SEE countries. The obligation to harmonize national legislation with the Brussels I Regulation in the pre-accession period is disputable, as the regulations may not be transposed in the national law and the Brussels I Regime is based on the mutual trust between Member States, with no benefits for (potential) candidate states. The national legislators of the South East Europe used the Brussels I regime as a model for the reforms of their Private International Law Acts, but also to create a regional multilateral convention with identical content as the Brussels I Regulation, which is called the Sarajevo Convention. This leads to an interesting situation where the EU Member States and the Lugano Convention parties will become third States to their own regime taken over in the Sarajevo Convention. Consequently, the reform of the status of third States in the Brussels I recast gets a new dimension for both, the SEE states and the Member States of the EU.