When should a renvoi be admitted?
The Regulation explicitly rules out the renvoi mechanism in 4 hypotheses:
A renvoi must be ruled out if the law specified to apply to the succession was specified pursuant to the exception clause set out in Article 21(2)[1].
Example :
If we imagine an elderly American national living in Belgium in a retirement home. If the bulk of their family and assets are in the United States, the judge might be tempted to give preference to American law over Belgian law.
It is of little importance here that American law rules that it is the law of the residence of the deceased that applies.
The refusal can be explained as follows: the exception clause expresses an imperative of proximity that the application of the renvoi would be likely to reduce to nothing.