The Drafting Process for a Hague Convention on Jurisdiction and Judgments with Special Consideration of Intellectual Property and E-commerce

This thesis is a study of the drafting process for the Hague Convention on Jurisdiction and Judgments. It will be demonstrated why the original goal of a broad treaty was given up in favor of a draft convention that only applies in international cases to exclusive choice of court agreements concluded in civil and commercial matters in the business-to-business setting. The reader will get an understanding of how the participating nations and interest groups influenced the negotiations and modified the outcome of the discussions. Special consideration was given to the matters of intellectual property and e-commerce, which were nearly completely excluded from the scope of the present draft. The thesis concludes that the project can only succeed if it includes business-to-consumer e-commerce transaction issues and intellectual property rights. Without the inclusion of these matters into the scope of the Hague Convention, it will lose further importance and face the danger of becoming obsolete