Law Applicable to Violations of Personality Rights in the New Croatian PIL Act: Is the Accepted Solution the Most Appropriate One?

Sa？etak Regulation (EC) No 864/2007 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 July 2007 on the law applicable to non-contractual obligations (Rome II Regulation), containing rules on applicable law for non-contractual obligations, is one of the most important sources of European private international law. Due to the inability of finding a compromise on the appropriate connecting factor for personality rights violations in the legislative procedure of enacting the Rome II Regulation, the European legislator decided to exclude violations of personality rights from the Rome II Regulation ambit. Since this issue is not governed by a relevant EU private international law source, courts of each EU Member State apply national conflict of laws rules. At the end of 2017, the new Private International Law Act was enacted in the Republic of Croatia and entered into force in January 2019. In the new PIL Act, the Croatian legislator decided to extend the application of the Rome II Regulation even to those issues which are excluded from its scope of application. The consequence of this approach is the fact that the law applicable to personality rights violations before Croatian courts will be determined based on Rome II general rule, i.e. the place of occurrence of the direct damage as a connecting factor. The latter demonstrates the influence of European law on Croatian private international law, not only in cases covered by the EU private international law sources, but also those falling outside of their scope. The aim of this paper is to analyze whether the approach accepted in the new PIL Act is the most appropriate one for violations of personality rights, particularly considering the controversy regarding the appropriateness of the place of occurrence of damage as the connecting factor during Rome II legislative procedure