Declining Jurisdiction in Private International Law: Reports to the XIVth Congress of the International Academy of Comparative Law, Athens, August 1994

This chapter deals, in a summary fashion, with some of the rather exceptional situations where Swedish courts are entitled, or even obliged, to decline to exercise the jurisdiction which they have under the normal Swedish jurisdictional rules. Not all such exceptional situations will be covered: among those omitted it is possible to mention those cases where the defendant enjoys jurisdictional immunity pursuant to the law of nations. Another self-imposed limitation on this chapter is that family law will not be dealt with here, since the nature and scope of the problem is very different in that field.

It must be pointed out that Sweden is a small jurisdiction with relatively few judicial decisions on this point. Together with the lack of comprehensive statutory regulation of the area under scrutiny, this leads to considerable uncertainty as to the state of the law. Many questions remain open and legal writers are often forced to resort to speculation and guesswork.

The jurisdiction of Swedish courts in civil matters is not exhaustively regulated by statute. The existing statutory jurisdictional rules deal mostly with rather special matters covered by the provisions on jurisdic

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