INTRODUCTION

Shortly after the Treaty of Amsterdam entered into force, the European Commission took the initiative to venture into the field of civil law enforcement. In particular, the Commission criticised the heterogeneity of national procedural systems, arguing that it meant that ‘litigants in the European Union are not on an equal footing’’. As a consequence of this inequality, the Commission claimed equal access to procedural weapons. The Commission mentioned banking seizures as one of the most powerful weapons against unwilling debtors. Furthermore, debtors’ obligation to inform their creditors about their assets varies considerably among the Member States. The Commission hence envisaged a uniform obligation for debtors to disclose information and exchange of information between national enforcement authorities. The Council pursued this approach in its draft programme for the implementation of the principle of mutual recognition with concrete proposals and invited the Commission to establish a system of provisional enforcement and protective measures as well as a Europe-wide system for the attachment of bank accounts.

The European Account Preservation Order (EAPO) Regulation that was subsequently developed applied from 18 January 2017 (Art. 54 EAPO Regulation). The Regulation introduces a European procedure for the preliminary preservation of bank accounts. It aims to prevent debtors from stashing away their money and to improve debt recovery in the EU. Beyond these objectives, with the Regulation the EU has for the first time in its legislative history entered the fields of preliminary measures and enforcement. Though a number of EU instruments exist in the area of civil procedural law, none of them previously encompassed actual enforcement. Art. 35 Brussels Ibis Regulation does not entirely unify the international jurisdiction for provisional measures, but refers the question to national law. The new generation of instruments create a European procedure and a European title for certain types of claims. But a European procedure on preliminary measures did not exist until recently.

The first part of this chapter examines the EAPO Regulation's scope of application and, in particular, its deviations from the other regulations in the field of procedural law. The second part outlines the role of the EAPO Regulation in light of the creditor's procedural options to collect a foreign debt and its interplay with other EU regulations, namely the Brussels Ibis Regulation, the Regulations on the European Enforcement Order (EEO), the European Order for Payment (EOP) and the European Small Claims Procedure (ESCP).