Not recognising a judgment contrary to EU Law only possible in case of breach of an essential rule of law

LITIGATION - PRIVATE INTERNATIONAL LAW - TRADEMARK LAW

That a judgment given in a Member State is contrary to EU law does not justify that a judgment is not being recognised on the grounds that it infringes public policy in a Member State, where the error of law relied on does not constitute a manifest breach of a rule of law regarded as essential in the EU legal order.

"In the light of all the foregoing considerations, the answer to the first and second questions is that Article 34(1) of Regulation No 44/2001 must be interpreted as meaning that the fact that a judgment given in a Member State is contrary to EU law does not justify that judgment’s not being recognised in another Member State on the grounds that it infringes public policy in that latter State where the error of law relied on does not constitute a manifest breach of a rule of law regarded as essential in the EU legal order and therefore in the legal order of the Member State in which recognition is sought or of a right recognised as being fundamental in those legal orders."
 

An error in affecting the application of Article 5(3) Trade Marks Directive is not a manifest breach of a rule of law regarded as essential in the EU legal order.

"That is not the case of an error affecting the application of a provision such as Article 5(3) of Directive 89/104.
51. As the Advocate General has observed in point 52 of his Opinion, the provision of substantive law at issue in the main proceedings, namely, Article 5(3) of Directive 89/104, is part of a directive seeking to achieve minimal harmonisation whose purpose is in part to approximate the different trade mark laws of the Member States. Although it is true that the enforcement of the rights conferred by Article 5 of that directive on the proprietor of a trade mark, and the proper application of the rules relating to the exhaustion of those rights, laid down in Article 7 of that directive, have a direct effect on the functioning of the internal market, it cannot be inferred from this that an error in the implementation of those provisions would be at variance to an unacceptable degree with the EU legal order inasmuch as it would infringe a fundamental principle of that legal order."

IPPT20150716, CJEU, Diageo Brands v Simiramida

C-681/13 - ECLI:EU:C:2015:471