V.V. TEREKHOV, 

Candidate of Legal Sciences, Master of European Union Law (LL.M.), 

Lecturer of the Department of Private Law of the Vilnius University 

This article describes an author’s view on the problem of the genesis and evolution of the EU activity in the field of its Member States’ Civil Procedural Law approximation. It is noted that from the conclusion of the Rome Treaty in 1957 to the present days the EU has passed a number of developmental stages, where each was marked by different goals, range of objects to be regulated and forms of influence upon the municipal law. Herewith the changes were evolutionary, rather than revolutionary and each consequent step did not set aside the previous ones, but relied upon their achievements and core ideas. At the same time, the meaning of such concepts as «mutual recognition», «common area of justice» had been sufficiently revised with time. The evolution was going in the direction of inevitable enlargement of EU competence in the matters of private justice. The author points out that the European Union was advancing, step by step, from a simple interstate cooperation in civil cases to a uniform procedural order that would unite all the national systems of judgment into a single whole. All of this became possible both due to the influence of external factors and in virtue of the natural desire of the European nations to develop in the direction of convergence and not separation and local insularity. 

Keywords: harmonization and unification of civil procedure; European Civil Procedure; mutual recognition; mutual trust; Area of Freedom, Security and Justice; cross-border litigation.