INTRODUCTION

This report addresses the application in Italy of EU Regulation No. 805/2004 creating a European Enforcement Order for uncontested claims (EEO), Regulation No. 1896/2006 creating a European Order for Payment procedure (EOP), Regulation No. 861/2007 establishing a European Small Claims Procedure (ESCP), Regulation No. 655/2014 establishing a European Account Preservation Order procedure to facilitate cross-border debt recovery in civil and commercial matters (EAPO), and Commission Implementing Regulation No. 2016/1823 establishing the forms referred to in EAPO Regulation5 (together also the ‘IC2BE Regulations’ or ‘Regulations’) in order to identify the paths that lead to an improvement of their consistency and effectiveness.

It is based on: (i) the case law collected in the IC2BE database which, as of 31 January 2020, included 49 judgments, of which 19 concerned the EEO Regulation, 22 the EOP Regulation, seven the ESCP Regulation, and one the EAPO Regulation; and (ii) 19 interviews performed and analysed, of which 10 were with lawyers in private practice, three with judges, four with business lawyers, and two with representatives of consumer organisations.

The project also benefited from two exchange and information events and from the final seminar organised by the Italian team. The analysis carried out in this report is further supported by the autonomous research of the team members.

PERVASIVE PROBLEMS

AWARENESS OF REGULATIONS

Awareness in General

The aforementioned collected data clearly portray a lack of awareness of the IC2BE Regulations. The lack of knowledge concerns, for the most part, the very existence of the Regulations; but even in cases where there is awareness of the existence of these instruments, a poor familiarity with their functioning is common.

This is due to, and has simultaneously caused, their poor application, as has been shown during the IC2BE project by the few jurisdictional rulings rendered and the difficulty the Italian team experienced in finding, especially for the interviews, legal practitioners cognisant of the existence of the Regulations and of the practical issues they may raise.

The majority of participants confirmed that there is not a sufficient amount of information available on those Regulations in Italy and complained about an absence of dedicated Italian websites. Most of them criticised the complexity of the information made available in Italian on the e-Justice Portal, especially for inexperienced parties such as consumers, and emphasised that there are no practical guidelines available for businesses or company lawyers.