Report Procedural Fund for Collective Actions
News
Jos Hoevenaars joins Vici ‘Affordable Justice’ team
On 1 November 2023, Jos Hoevenaars re-joined Erasmus School of Law after completing a one-year research project at the Dutch Council for the Judiciary which focused on questions of effectiveness of judgments in the Dutch legal system (report available early 2024). Previously, he was part of our ERC ‘Building EU civil justice’ team, where his research focused mainly on (self)representation in court and access to justice in a cross-border context. In 2022, he was the executive project manager for a study commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security and its Research and Documentation Centre (WODC) that looked into the usefulness and necessity of a litigation fund for collective actions in the Netherlands (Dutch report available here, English book forthcoming).
The coming years he will strengthen the Vici ‘Affordable Access to Justice’ team, focusing on costs and funding of collective actions, and he will develop a new line of research in the area of strategic litigation in which he will investigate the collective and representative action field from a legal mobilisation perspective. He will also play a role in the setting up of a European Civil Justice Centre.
Published: September 14, 2023
On request of the Ministry of Justice, Xandra kramer conducted a study on a procedural fund for collective actions, together with Jos Hoevenaars (Council for the Judiciary/Erasmus University Rotterdam), and Ianika Tzankova and Karlijn van Doorn (Tilburg University).
We carried out research to map developments in collective actions, did quantitative research on WAMCA cases and qualitative research on the funding of collective actions, including on developments in the market and regulation of third party litigation funding in the Netherlands and several other countries. Noteworthy is that all claims for damages so far rely on third party funding. The key question we looked into is to what extent a revolving litigation fund could provide a solution to bottlenecks in the funding of collective actions and how such a procedural fund could be designed. Considering the relatively small number of cases for damages that have been brought under the WAMCA so far and uncertainties in legal practice and regulation, coupled with the complexities to set up such a fund, we conclude that the introduction of a revolving litigation fund seems premature. We make a number of suggestions for further research. The report is available here.
We are preparing an English version of the report to be published by Eleven International Publishing - coming soon!