The body and its staff must carry out the evaluation and verification operations with the highest degree of professional integrity and technical competence and must be free from all pressures and inducements, particularly financial, which might influence their judgement or the results of the inspection, especially from persons or groups of persons with an interest in the results of verifications.

Moreover, this Directive, and in particular its provisions relating to information about any contractual clause on law applicable to the contract and/or on the competent court does not affect the applicability to the distance marketing of consumer financial services of Council Regulation (EC) No 44/2001 of 22 December 2000 on jurisdiction and the recognition and enforcement of judgements in civil and commercial matters(5) or of the 1980 Rome Convention on the law applicable to contractual obligations.

Where such notification has been made in accordance with the formalities required by the law of the court seised and in such time and in such a manner that the HNS Fund has in fact been in a position effectively to intervene as a party to the proceedings, any judgement rendered by the court in such proceedings shall, after it has become final and enforceable in the State where the judgement was given, become binding upon the HNS Fund in the sense that the facts and findings in that judgement may not be disputed by the HNS Fund even if the HNS Fund has not actually intervened in the proceedings.

If the obligation of a debtor's debtor to repay a claim is dependent on the obligation of the debtor to deliver up a specific thing in his possession, this latter obligation being determined by a finally binding judgement, the court shall, upon an application by the creditor on whom the claim has been transferred into collection, issue a decree ordering the debtor to deliver up the thing in question to the court, which shall thereupon hand it over to the debtor's debtor.