Publication details

Civil Law in the Czech Republic: The Draft Version of the Civil Code and Consumer Protection

Authors	SELUCKÁ Markéta
Year of publication	2010
Type	Article in Periodical
Magazine / Source	European review of private law
MU Faculty or unit	Faculty of Law
Citation
Field	Law sciences
Keywords	civil law; consumer protection; draft of Czech Civil Law
Description	For a long time, work has been in progress in the Czech Republic on a new draft of the Civil Code, which is meant to be a modern codifi cation of private law. The current Civil Code is from 1964, and, despite its 1991 amendments that brought it into harmony with democratic legal principles (the original code was a product of a socialist legislature that, among other things, subdued such institutes as private ownership, autonomy of will, and so forth), it is not up to date. Not only does it still preserve its socialist past, but also, its frequent amendments also turned it into a non-systematic codifi cation of highly disparate elements. In addition, numerous obligations are regulated by the Commercial Code, which causes serious problems with its legal interpretation and brings uncertainty into civil law relations. The drafters of the new Civil Code have reverted back to the original tradition (ABGB, Code Civil, and the 1937 Civil Code draft), without, however, taking into consideration some modern trends in civil law, namely, consumer protection and tendencies towards the unifi cation of law. The article focuses on the issue of consumer protection in the draft proposal of the Civil Code, refl ecting on the most contested issues of the legal regulation of consumer protection. In particular, it reacts to the change in the concept of the consumer, the lowering of the standard of consumer protection in the case of the sale of goods in shops, and the insensitive appropriation of terminology from EC law into the Czech legal order, which often happens without regard to the institutes of Czech private law, mainly the law of obligations.