Luxembourg, 14/11/2005 (Agence Europe) - The European Court of Justice has just taken position in the "Leffler" ruling, stating that the refusal of the addressee to receive a legal or extra-judiciary document due to the language used does not render this document null and void, because the sender is able to remedy this infringement of the provisions of an EC regulation by sending the requested translation. A request for interpretation was made by the Hoge Raad (Court of Cassation) of the Netherlands, regarding an EC regulation of 21 May 2000 on the notification, in the Member States, of legal and extra-judiciary documents on civil or commercial cases, according to a press release by the Court.
This regulation provides that the addressee of a document, which has not been translated into the language of the Member State in which this document is transmitted, is entitled to refuse it. This affair related to litigation between a person, Götz Leffler, and a German company, Berlin Chemie, which rejected appearance notices issued by a Dutch court because they had not been written in German. The Court ofAppeal of Arnhem, before which Berlin Chemie was due to appear, refused to rule on the German company by default. The Court decided that as the rule concerning the language as provided for by the EC regulation, had not been respected, this notice had no legal effect. The Court of Cassation had sent the dossier to the European Court of Justice for it to interpret the regulation.