A case-study of the instrumentalisation of Private International Law in the year 2010: developments at the beginning of a new decade: On the 30th of December 2009, the court of The Hague accepted international competence in the case “Shell/Shell Nigeria”…During these legal proceedings it is possible that issues about applicable law will come forward. In this article, the author focuses on Private International Law Issues as related to cases like Shell, without focusing however on the PIL-issues of the specific Shell case itself. The article focuses on the Rome II Regulation – the new European PIL-source including rules of applicable law on torts. [Executive summary in English, full article in Dutch]