Volume 14, Issue 3

The European Union’s exploration of a central bank digital currency, the “digital euro”, marks a pivotal development in the evolution of digital money and monetary infrastructure. Envisioned as a new form of legal tender, issued by Eurosystem central banks and distributed by private intermediaries, the digital euro raises fundamental legal questions both from a public and a private law perspective. As regards the latter, it is increasingly suggested to recognize the digital euro as “property” and to embed this decision within legislation at the EU level. Whilst this classification reflects a broader trend in the treatment of cryptoassets and digital money, it remains conceptually underdeveloped. In particular, the classification itself only serves as a starting point for the digital euro’s further legal integration, which must navigate the tension between the limits of EU competences and ensuring the uniform treatment of the single currency’s digital version. This paper seeks to address both issues, further contouring the digital euro as “property” within the boundaries of EU competence. It will be developed that clarifying transfer modalities for the digital euro, recognising its character both as a new payment asset and a new payment system, offers a practical path toward broader private law integration. It will also be established that EU harmonisation in this regard is possible based on Article 133 TFEU. Stipulating a corresponding lex ferenda will provide the legal certainty needed to support the digital euro’s adoption across – and potentially beyond – the internal market.

This paper investigates the judicial approach to time-sharing contracts of immovable goods at the EU and Albanian levels. It begins by situating the discussion within the broader context of Albania’s accession process to the European Union, identifying recent legal and institutional developments aimed at aligning domestic norms with EU standards. The study underscores the pivotal role of judicial interpretation in facilitating legal harmonization and examines key rulings of the Court of Justice of the European Union that have shaped the application of timeshare and related consumer protection rules across Member States. Given the absence of national jurisprudence directly addressing time-sharing contracts, the paper turns to decisions rendered by Albanian courts in the fields of consumer protection and co-ownership, operating on the premise that timeshare agreements for immovable goods share conceptual affinities with these legal institutes. Through this comparative lens, the analysis reveals the similarities and difference between the judicial perspectives between European and Albanian judges.

EU directives adopt a functional method. This implies that they are drafted on the assumption that implementing laws are functionally equivalent and, crucially, that the concepts they contain are system-neutral and autonomous without doctrinal commitments. This article primarily tests these assumption by exploring the interpretation given to the possession and/or control requirement in the Financial Collateral Arrangement Directive (‘Collateral Directive’). The argument in the article is that based on the analysis of case law, the control/possession requirements in the Collateral Directive strongly aligns, and reflect, the control requirements under English law. Whereas in English law, much about fixed charges turn to whether the collateral taker has control and the collateral provider is prohibited from disposing of the securities, in Civil law systems, this is not important, as it is in the nature of security right that they are binding on successors and cannot be freely disposed. Thus, in Civil law systems, the completion of a security arrangement suffices without any need for dispossession or control. Moreover, this argument is boosted by the fact that contrary to the drafting of the Collateral Directive, the control requirement is not a perfection requirement – a view which aligns with the rationale for the control requirement for the fixed/floating charge characterisation. Essentially, the arguments in the article suggest that the interpretation of the possession and control requirement is not system neutral.