Petillo and another v Unipol Assicurazioni SpA C-371/12
The facts: on 21 September 2007 Carlo Petillo sustained
minor injuries in a rear end collision in Italy by a car insured by Unipol;
liability was not contested. He
presented his claim against Unipol direct, which included a claim for
non-material damage, which is a similar concept to general damages in the UK
but which, as a unitary concept, cannot be divided into categories or headings.
Under Italian law, the prescribed levels
of compensation awarded for such loss where there are minor injuries differentiates
between claims caused by the use of motor vehicles and waterborne craft, on the
one hand, and claims based on other liability scenarios, on the other. Under this code the level of compensation prescribed
for road accident injuries is considerably less than would otherwise the be
case[1]. The Italian court referred the issue as to
whether this infringed the Second Directive to the CJEU.
The decision: No it did not. On the facts, the CJEU found that this legislation did not automatically
exclude or disproportionally limit the victim’s right to compensation. It held that the directives do not preclude,
in principle, either national legislation imposing binding criteria on national
courts as to how the non-material damage should be compensated or specific
schemes adapted to the particular circumstances of road traffic accidents, even
if these schemes are less favourable to the victim than would be awarded to
accidents other than road traffic accidents.
No comments:
Post a Comment