The EUROSPARKS project

The adoption of civil legal procedures concerning road traffic enforcement and road user charging in the UK and a number of other European jurisdictions such as the Netherlands, Belgium and Malta, is leading to problems of enforcing civil judgments and other tribunal decisions across European borders. This is leading to inevitable inequalities of treatment between different classes of citizen, and in particular between the compliant nationals within their own member state and non-compliant visitors from another member state who choose to ignore local traffic regulations, or fail to pay civil debts arising from their vehicle use in another member state.

This project has started to research the comparative legal basis of cross-border enforcement of non-criminal court and tribunal decisions in a number of European countries, and in particular look to draw upon custom and practice in parallel legal policy areas such as environment, tax or family law to identify possible future legal developments at European or inter-governmental level. The research will also create a roadmap for legal innovation in a policy field which not been addressed by those initiating new cross-border co-operative civil judicial measures.

The legal research will be disseminated to a wide audience of legal policy creators at European, national and regional level. Dissemination partners have been selected on the basis of the relevance the topic has to their own situation, and the effectiveness that that they will be able to bring to reach the target legal audience. Partners come from eight member states include eight municipality associations, three major universities plus the International Bar Association, which has a global reach.