PRESENTATION ON A FUTURE EUROPEAN CODE FOR BUSINESS LAW

A JURI (Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament) meeting was held in October 2016, where Members of the JURI had the opportunity to hear a presentation about a new project on a future European code for business law. The Henri Capitant Association made an inventory about all the existing EU legislations in a large number of areas of business law (market law, company law, securities, enforcement, insolvency law, banking law, insurance law, social law, tax law, e-commerce law, financial market, IP law), identifying the loopholes and analysing the current state of harmonisation.

The call for a European code of business law comes together with certain examples of possible future steps to further harmonise EU law. The rationale behind this project is that the euro-zone will remain fragile unless it has solid legal foundations and is based on a harmonised – or even unified – business law. The Members may raise questions to the authors, and more generally, may exchange views for example on the need for ‘more Europe’ in the areas of competence of the Legal Affairs Committee, or whether the subsidiarity and proportionality principles (i.e. areas in which the European Union does not have exclusive competence safeguarding the ability of Member States to make decisions in order to ensure that powers are exercised as close to the citizens as possible) have prevented the European commercial law from emerging.