Crossroads in Private International Law // Can the Hague Draft Convention on Parallel Proceedings Succeed? Rethinking Coordination in a Plural Legal Order

The Centre for Private International Law & Transnational Governance invites you to attend the next webinar in our Crossroads in Private International Law webinar series. You can find the link to register at the bottom of this page.

Dr Aygun Mammadzada (Swansea University) will deliver a webinar “Can the Hague Draft Convention on Parallel Proceedings Succeed? Rethinking Coordination in a Plural Legal Order”.

This webinar is based on a forthcoming paper to be published in summer 2026. It examines whether the Hague Draft Convention on Parallel Proceedings can meaningfully address the challenges it seeks to resolve. It questions the conventional assumption that parallel proceedings constitute a procedural failure and instead situates them as a structural feature of a fragmented and plural international legal order. Against this backdrop, the Draft Convention’s hybrid model combining the first-seised rule with a discretionary “more appropriate court” analysis, is critically assessed. The webinar argues that the challenges facing the Draft Convention are not incidental but structural, pointing to inherent limits of jurisdictional harmonisation. In a plural legal order, more flexible and adaptive approaches may offer a more credible path for managing parallel proceedings.