A Study On The Parallel Litigation Of International Civil And Commercial Affairs In China

In the context of economic globalization, countries’ jurisdiction systems which are different and expansionary result in positive conflicts of foreign-related civil and commercial jurisdiction easily. Since more than one country has jurisdiction, litigants in international civil and commercial disputes tend to adopt forum shopping for their own interests, which always leads to a situation that litigants sue in courts of different countries simultaneously or successively on the same disputes. For reasons given above the emergence of international parallel proceedings on civil and commercial affairs is almost inevitable. No doubt international parallel proceedings can provide litigants from different countries with litigation convenience so that parties are able to obtain necessary and legitimate judicial relief such as protecting comprehensive settlement of creditors’ rights, preventing the statute of limitations expired, protecting the defendant’s litigious rights, restricting the improper jurisdiction of foreign courts, etc. However, when litigants abuse litigious rights or delay proceedings maliciously, parallel proceedings turn into an existing problem to be solved. It often causes an increase in the burden of the parties, a waste of judicial resources, a situation of the contradictions and conflicts of verdicts issued by different courts which also makes the recognition and enforcement of judgments between countries harder. Because of these, relevant legal mechanisms for regulation and coordination of international parallel proceedings have emerged. From China’s legislations and judicial practices concerning international parallel proceedings, the solution to the issues about international civil and commercial parallel proceedings is not ideal. There is still room for future improvements. So it is necessary to learn from foreign rich experiences combined with China’s national conditions in order to improve China’s coordination mechanism.This article is divided into four chapters. It mainly adopts comparative analysis method and approach of combining theory and practice to research the issues of China’s international civil and commercial parallel proceedings. The first chapter is an overview of international civil and commercial parallel proceedings. With the definition of parallel proceedings, this part analyzes multiple causes and positive and negative values of international parallel proceedings issues in detail to draw a conclusion that issues about international civil and commercial parallel proceedings should be regulated reasonably. The second chapter is about analysis of the status quo of China’s international civil and commercial parallel proceedings. This section mainly concentrates on illustrating and analyzing China’s present legislations and judicial practices to find existing problems and to dig out the root causes of the problems. The third chapter is about comments on foreign available coordination mechanisms for regulating international civil and commercial parallel proceedings. This section mainly summarizes American and European available coordination mechanisms and reviews the advantages and disadvantages of these coordination mechanisms so as to explore whether some of them are appropriate for China. The forth chapter offers suggestions on the basis of above three chapters to improve China’s current coordination mechanism for regulating international civil and commercial parallel proceedings. On the one hand, the inherent perspective and thought about China’s international civil and commercial parallel proceedings should be changed to embody its times. On the other hand, possible specific measures and approaches should be researched comprehensively to improve China’s coordination mechanism so as to resolve transnational civil disputes fairly and reasonably and eventually to promote transnational civil relationships smoothly.