Szerző: Péter Gárdos
European Review of Private Law, 5/2007. page 702-722
It is also important to mention the various academic initiatives in the field of civil law. Since the preparation of the Principles of European Contract Law, different organisations were formed with the intention of harmonising smaller or larger parts of contract law. One of the most ambitious of these groups is the successor body of the Lando Commission (i.e. the Commission on European Contract Law), the Study Group on a European Civil Code, which ‘has taken upon itself the task of drafting common European principles for the most important aspects of the law of obligations and for certain parts of the law of property in movables which are especially relevant for the functioning of the common market’. It is almost impossible to foresee the outcome of this project.
When the original Conception was adopted in 2002, the drafters could not anticipate these developments. The Conception concluded, therefore, that ‘[a]lthough legal harmonisation of the European Union in the past two decades reached the field of private law, and national legislations are strongly influenced by this, private law as such can, at this point in time, only be codified on a national level’.
One of the first preliminary questions was to define the scope of persons to whom the new Civil Code shall apply. Should the Code deal with questions of consumer law? Should the Code apply to commercial transactions? And if the legislator intends to extend to scope of the Civil Code to these transactions, what should the new Code focus on?
Different models exist within the European Union regarding how the directives of the European Union relating to consumer law are implemented into the national laws. There are countries, which have adopted consumer contract codes (e.g. Austria, France, Greece, and Italy), while other countries attempted to incorporate these rules – to a larger or a smaller extent – into their Civil Codes.
Hungary follows a mixed approach. Certain provisions of certain directives are transposed into the Civil Code (e.g. 93/13/EEC Directive on unfair terms in consumer contracts), other provisions were implemented in Government Decrees (e.g. Government Decree 17 of 1999 incorporating 97/7/EC Directive on the protection of consumers in respect of distance contracts), while certain rules can be found in Act CLV of 1997 on Consumer Protection.
The rules of the Civil Code have been amended twice in the past few years regarding the rules on standard contract terms and unfair terms in consumer contracts. The latest amendment (Act III of 2006) incorporated the principles that can be drawn from the case law of the European Court of Justice (most importantly Oceano Grupo Editorial SA v. Rocio Murciano Quintero C-240/98, Cofidis SA v. Jean-Louis Fredout C-473/00, and Commission v. Spain C-70/03). The Conception foresaw, however, the incorporation of almost all directives. These could either take place in the general part of contract law(e.g. 2000/31/EC (E-Commerce) Directive), or among the specific contracts (e.g. 94/47/EC directive on the protection of purchasers in respect of certain aspects of contracts relating to the purchase of the right to use immovable properties on a timeshare basis).
The Conception states that the main reason why the directives are not organically incorporated into the national civil codes is that the directives contain a minimum level of consumer rights, which are mandatory for the professional. ‘Such an exclusion of dispositivity is not common in the field of the original approach of contract law based on the principle of freedom of contract’. This, however, could only be one of the reasons. From a codification point of view, there are at least two other basic problems: the low level of abstractness and the poor quality of the directives.
The levels of abstractness of the civil codes and European directives differ significantly. The consumer directives embody regulations which can hardly be regulated in a civil code. If the legislator intends to implement the E-Commerce Directive into the Civil Code, this would mean that the Civil Code has to define terms like information society, and to contain provisions relating to the correction of input errors. The German Civil Code (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, BGB) shows that this is possible to achieve (see Sections 312e of the BGB), but the provisions do not fit into the very abstract, scholarly categories of the BGB.
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