Interview with Patrick Klugman, lawyer representing Israeli companies in Eurosatory and Euronaval cases

While the State initially banned the participation of Israeli companies in the Euronaval exhibition, an international event dedicated to naval defense technologies and maritime security, bringing together businessmen and experts in the field, Paris commercial court of Wednesday October 30, 2024, in summary. proceedings, the decision of the National Defense and Security Council which prohibits Israeli companies from exhibiting at the Euronaval exhibition.

Last June, the commercial court of Paris had already suspended the same ban on the participation of Israeli exhibitors at the Eurosatory exhibition, a global event dedicated to defense technologies and land and air security.

In both cases, the court considers that the inaccessibility of these events, decided by the executive in the first place, is a form of discrimination for the relevant companies. Patrick Klugman represented Israeli companies and the French-Israeli Chamber of Commerce in the minutes regarding the Eurosatory and Euronaval trade fairs. So he opposed the decisions to exclude these companies from defense exhibits. His action and that of his associates led the commercial court of Paris to cancel these bans.

You can find out the interview with Maître Patrick Klugman below in a video:

The interview was also transcribed:

“From Eurosatory, it is clear that there is a desire at the highest level of the state to prevent Israeli companies from gaining access. Although it was never clearly planned, we understand that Israeli companies in the field of defense must respond, in some way, to the bad relationship between Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Emmanuel Macron. The difference between the two exhibitions, Eurosatory and Euronaval, is firstly in the scale of the companies affected: Eurosatory concerns a larger number of companies. However, at Eurosatory, no one wants to take responsibility for this decision that the organizing company, a private company, will receive the final notice for these Israeli contractors. No minister or authority says publicly: “This is what we have decided.” This puts businesses in a delicate position, which is why we took the case to the Commercial Court. So the company must comply because they say they were asked, but we will never know who asked and what. Simply put we have a company that bans companies solely on the basis of their nationality from having access to a trade fair. It is on this basis that the organizing company was criticized.

For Euronaval, the context is different. The State has taken into account the court decisions received for Eurosatory, and the irritation of the President of the Republic seems to have increased.
He moved the state machine at the highest level. Two decisions were made by the Defense Council, bringing the ministers of the land together. Nevertheless, we decided to go before the Commercial Court because if the landlord is the landlord, this is a private company that forbids other companies from having access to an exhibition, always on the basis of Nationality.
The prefect then sent a waiver of jurisdiction to the president of the court, a unique measure by which the State prohibits a legal court from intervening in a particular dispute. After hard work on our part, the president of the court objected, that is to say that he retained his jurisdiction and therefore ruled, regardless of the decisions made by the Defense Council, that the company that sent the Euronaval show could not stop the Israeli companies from standing at the show. Because that was what it was about.

This is how it happened for these two shows. For Euronaval, we really saw the apparatus of the State following the political decision of the President of the Republic and doing everything to ensure that the five Israeli companies could not stand.

The absurdity of the situation reaches its peak with the last criterion used to try to avoid the accusation of discrimination: they demanded that Israeli companies have no equipment connected to Gaza or Lebanon to participate. However, initially, this condition was applied only to Israeli companies and not to the Americans or Germans, who could also be involved in these sectors. And in the end, even this condition was not applied. So the discrimination was still obvious, and the president of the Commercial Court boldly pointed it out. He chose to stop this discrimination by ordering access to the stands for Israeli companies, and this time, unlike Eurosatory, the deadline allowed this resolution. So Israeli companies that booked their place at Euronaval could present their products on the stand. Even with a state decision being requested, the legal judge who seizes the main dispute can stop an obvious illegal disturbance, in this case discrimination.

So it is discrimination that motivates this decision. Freedom of trade and industry is incompatible with discrimination or boycotts of any kind.

Because there was a risk of companies boycotting based on nationality, it was ordered to stop this measure and allow Israeli companies to enter the stands they had purchased. »

Only one company, it seems, could come in the end, but the others have been put into the show as planned. And what is special is that the organizing company, Sogena, did not appeal to this decision, thus allowing the exhibition to be held in the presence of Israeli companies, without an obvious conflict.