## Facts

- A German company employed a Belgian resident to work in Belgium for its Belgian subsidiary under a German-language employment contract.
- The contract contained an exclusive forum-selection clause designating the courts of Kleve, Germany for disputes arising from the contract.
- A later dispute concerning the employment relationship led to termination, and the employee sued both the German parent and Belgian subsidiary in Belgian courts.
- The defendants appeared in the Belgian proceedings; the German parent raised a jurisdictional objection based on the forum-selection clause only after some months.
- The Belgian trial court treated jurisdiction agreements as potentially valid under the Brussels Convention but refused to enforce the clause because Belgian employment-language legislation required a different contract language, and it entered judgment against both defendants.
- On appeal, the Belgian Court of Cassation referred questions to the Court of Justice for interpretation of the 1968 Brussels Convention, including the interplay of jurisdiction by agreement and by appearance, related actions, and the effect of national language rules on forum clauses.

## Issues

1. Whether Brussels Convention Article 18 (jurisdiction by appearance) can apply even if the parties concluded a jurisdiction agreement within Article 17.
2. Whether a defendant’s appearance confers jurisdiction under Article 18 when the defendant both contests jurisdiction and submits on the merits, and how the timing of the objection is assessed.
3. Whether Brussels Convention Article 22 (related actions) applies only when actions are pending in courts of different Contracting States.
4. Whether a Contracting State may allow an Article 17 jurisdiction agreement to be invalidated solely because the clause is not in the language required by national law.

## Decision

- Article 18 applies even where the parties have designated a court by agreement under Article 17.
- Article 18 does not confer jurisdiction where the defendant timely contests jurisdiction under the forum’s procedural rules, even if the defendant also makes submissions on the merits.
- Article 22 applies only to related actions pending before courts of two or more Contracting States.
- Article 17 precludes national rules that call into question the validity of a jurisdiction clause solely because it is not drafted in the language required by national legislation.

## Legal Principles

- Jurisdiction by appearance under the Brussels Convention operates independently of jurisdiction by agreement; it is displaced only by a timely jurisdictional challenge.
- A defendant is not deemed to have accepted jurisdiction merely by defending on the merits if the jurisdiction objection is raised no later than the procedural stage treated as the first defense under national law.
- The related-actions mechanism is a cross-border coordination rule and does not govern allocation of jurisdiction within a single Contracting State.
- Article 17’s formal requirements for forum-selection clauses are exhaustive for Convention purposes; Contracting States may not add purely formal national conditions (including language-form requirements) that would invalidate an otherwise Convention-compliant agreement.

## Conclusion

The Court of Justice held that the Brussels Convention permits jurisdiction by appearance even in the presence of a forum-selection clause, but only if the defendant does not timely object; it further limited related-actions coordination to cross-border parallel litigation and barred Member States from invalidating Convention-compliant jurisdiction clauses solely on national language-form grounds.


Elefanten Schuh GmbH v. Jacqmain, Case C-150/80, [1981] E.C.R. 1671 (Ct. Just. June 24, 1981)