Contracts Concerning Rights in Immovable Property in the Light of Directive 2011/83/EU, and the Consumer Rights Act Implementing It

Abstract

The Consumer Rights Act of 30 May 2014 implements to the Polish legal system the Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council 2011/83/EU of 25 October 2011 on consumer rights. It should therefore provide a comprehensive regulation on the contracts whose parties are the trader and the consumer. For the correct determination of the legal situation of the traders concluding contracts with the consumers, it is therefore important to specify a catalogue of contracts to which the provisions of the Consumer Rights Act apply. This catalogue (the subjective scope of the Act) came in for criticism by the legislature, which enumerated the contracts to which the provisions of the Act do not apply. This article focuses not so much on an overall analysis of the types of contracts excluded from the application of the Consumer Rights Act, but rather attempts to diagnose whether, and to what extent, contracts regulating the rights in immovable property have been excluded from the Act. In addition, it asks whether the regulations that shape these exclusions in the Consumer Rights Act in fact reflect the intention of the European legislature expressed in the Directive. To verify the aims of the study, the regulations of the Act that form the exclusions of the contracts concerning rights in immovable property are presented. As shown by the undertaken analysis, the content of the regulations affecting the exclusions regarding the contracts for the rights in immovable property can be interpreted inconsistently, which results in doubts as to what kind of contracts the Act applies to in full, and which contracts have been excluded from its regime and to what extent. The analyses presented in the study also show that the regulations contained in the Consumer Rights Act do not contain a proper reflection of the intentions of the European legislature. In respect to the exclusions of the application of the Consumer Rights Act to the contracts for the rights in immovable property, the Consumer Rights Act differs from the Directive.

Keywords

• civil law
• contracts
• immovable property
• law application
• implementation of the Directive