Foreign Law in the English Courts

News | Mon 29th Feb, 2016

A number of the English lawyers who conduct PI litigation in cross-border cases have warned that the full implications of the Rome II Regulation (864/2007) – and the impact that it has on the assessment of damages awarded to English Claimants by English Judges – have yet to be felt. By way of recap, Rome II provides (in Article 15(c)) that once the applicable law of the tort has been identified it will apply (among other things) to the existence, the nature and the assessment of the damages to which the Claimant is entitled. In other words, (and by contrast to the previous position under the Private International Law (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1995) Rome II extends the reach of the foreign applicable law beyond the identification of heads of recoverable loss and into the assessment of damages process itself. This means a much greater role for foreign legal experts in the English Courts and it also means that English Judges may find themselves confronting (on a regular basis, given the volume of EU RTA claims in the English jurisdiction) vexed foreign law issues which have not been clearly resolved in the foreign jurisdiction from which they derive. In this sense, an English Judge may be called to determine (if you like “to make”) German/French/Lithuanian (delete as appropriate) law. Soole J confronted a dilemma of just this kind in the very recent case of Syred v PZU SA [2015] EWHC 254 (QB) (12.2.16): a PI claim by an English Claimant against a Polish insurer Defendant in respect of an RTA in Poland (to which the English Court applied the law of Poland). One of the issues confronting the Court was the assessment of (what we would call) general damages for pain, suffering and loss of amenity. Polish law provided no fixed scales or guidelines for such damages, but there was evidence that Polish Judges tended to use the non-pecuniary elements of a table or tariff published in an Ordinance by the Polish Labour Ministry. So far, so good, but the additional expert evidence was that the Polish Supreme Court had criticised the use of the Ordinance in this way. Despite this, the Polish lower Courts had continued to use the Ordinance and the Supreme Court had failed to provide an alternative method of calculation of such damages. What was the English Judge to do? The use of the Ordinance was (per Polish Supreme Court) unlawful where it was the sole method of assessment of general damages, however, it was a continuing convention of the Polish Courts to have regard to the Ordinance (in the “overall” assessment process) and it was, therefore, permissible for the English Judge to have similar regard in assessing damages (see, Wall v Mutuelle de Poitiers Assurance [2014] 1 WLR 4263 (CA)). Soole J went ahead and assessed damages accordingly.

This looks like a pragmatic solution: after all, the Judge has to find some means by which to make the appropriate award. However, it also looks like an English Judge has resolved an issue of Polish law that the Polish Courts have yet wholly to resolve for themselves. One wonders whether Soole J’s decision will have any precedent value in Poland?