Making Foreign People Pay

Book excerpt: First published in 1999, Making Foreign People Pay deals with the recovery of monetary claims in cross-border legal relations and contains the results of a comparative empirical research of debt recovery procedures of three countries with different socio-legal environments, Germany, England and Turkey. In order to analyse judicial debt recovery of cross-border claims, court statistics and files have been evaluated. The data show an infrequent use of the courts in all three countries. It seems that legal efforts aiming at facilitating international procedures have not been successful. But court procedures for the recovery of monetary claims are now to a large extent interchangeable with what may be called ‘privatised methods of debt collection’, including modern financial services such as factoring, forfaiting and commercial debt collection. Empirical evidence shows that such privatization of debt collection is a strong trend in cross-border debt collection. The book is an empirical contribution to the ongoing discussion of globalization processes and describes an important field of the globalization of law.