Case C-455/26, Keramik – told about the debt and ordered to pay it in the same envelope
A European Enforcement Order lets a creditor skip the courts of the debtor’s Member State altogether. The price of that shortcut is a set of minimum standards, and the first of them is that the debtor must have been told what the claim was — in good time to argue about it.
Facts
A Slovenian building-trades sole trader, KERAMIK IN ZAKLJUČNA GRADBENA DELA, is pursuing a claim against WORK4YOU, a construction and services company. The enforcement ran on the Slovenian model built around an “authentic document” — an invoice or similar instrument on which an enforcement order issues without prior adversarial proceedings. The creditor did set out the basis of the claim in the application for enforcement; the difficulty is that the application reaches the debtor only at the same moment as the order itself. Slovenian courts read that sequencing as failing the requirement that the debtor be duly informed about the claim, and therefore refuse to certify the resulting final order as a European Enforcement Order. The Višje sodišče v Kopru (Higher Court, Koper), hearing the appeal, doubts whether that reading is compatible with Regulation No 805/2004 and has referred a single question.
Questions Referred
According to the Official Journal notice, the Višje sodišče v Kopru asks:
Is an interpretation of national law according to which it is not possible to issue a European Enforcement Order on the basis of a final order for enforcement on the basis of an authentic document because, even in a case where the creditor states the basis for its claim in the application for enforcement (which is served on the debtor only at the same time as the order), the condition of ensuring that the debtor is provided with due information about the claim is not fulfilled contrary to Regulation No 805/2004?
Sources
OJ notice C/2026/3984 (EUR‑Lex) · Case file on CURIA · Regulation (EC) No 805/2004
Comment
The question arrives with its own answer half-formed, and the shape of that answer depends on whether one reads Regulation 805/2004 as a machine for recognising judgments or as a bargain about silence. Its logic is that a claim which the debtor never contested may be enforced anywhere in the Union without intermediate proceedings — but only because the debtor’s silence can be treated as acquiescence. Silence carries that weight only if the debtor knew what was being claimed and knew how to object. Hence the minimum standards of Chapter III: proper information about the claim, proper information about the procedural steps, and a cure mechanism for defects.
Slovenia’s difficulty is a familiar one for systems that run enforcement on authentic documents, and the Court has been there before. In Case C‑484/15, Zulfikarpašić (ECLI:EU:C:2017:199) it examined the Croatian version — a writ of execution issued by a notary on an authentic document — and held both that such notaries are not a “court” within the meaning of the regulation and, more fundamentally, that an uncontested writ of that kind cannot be certified as a European Enforcement Order because it does not concern an “uncontested claim” within Article 3(1). The reasoning cuts at the root: where the first the debtor hears of the matter is an order to pay, the failure to object proves nothing about the claim’s merits.
Keramik is not identical — the referring court’s own description suggests a final order made in judicial rather than notarial proceedings, and the question is framed the other way round, asking whether refusing certification breaches the regulation rather than whether granting it would. But the two cases meet on the same point: whether telling the debtor and ordering the debtor to pay in one and the same act can satisfy a standard designed to give the debtor something to answer before judgment. The Court has read the certification stage strictly elsewhere too — in Case C‑300/14, Imtech Marine Belgium (ECLI:EU:C:2015:825) it required the certifying court to satisfy itself that national law allows a full review in law and in fact of a judgment given in absentia, and that only a judge may certify.
What is genuinely open is the direction of travel. If the Court answers that Slovenia’s restrictive reading is contrary to the regulation, the practical effect is to widen the class of national instruments that travel across borders without exequatur — at a time when the instrument itself is in decline, Brussels I recast having abolished exequatur generally and left the European Enforcement Order a residual role. If it confirms the restrictive reading, authentic-document enforcement stays domestic, and creditors in these systems keep taking the longer route. Either way, this is a case about how much procedural thinness a cross-border shortcut can carry before the shortcut stops being justified.