Izvorni znanstveni članak
Notarial Enforcement Orders and Protection of Consumers: New Challenges of Europeization of Civil Procedure
Alan Uzelac
orcid.org/0000-0001-5986-3909
; Pravni fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Sažetak
Notarial enforcement orders are a specific, indigenous instrument of Croatian and post-Yugoslav civil procedure. Such orders, officially entitled “enforcement orders based on ‘trustworthy’ documents” (hereafter: EOTD) are issued in a hybrid ex parte procedure in which a payment order is amalgamated with the enforcement writ. In the past, EOTDs were within court jurisdiction. They were introduced in the 1970’s as an optional instrument in the Enforcement Act (EA), alongside the payment orders regulated in the Code of Civil Procedure (CCP). Until 1990s, EOTDs were a relatively marginal, seldom used instrument. However, since 1990s they were made mandatory for most cases of monetary debt enforcement. Since 2005 the issuing of EOTDs was transferred to the jurisdictions of public notaries as notarial enforcement orders, and the EOTDs became the most wide-spread form of civil procedure nationwide. Currently, about 700,000 EOTDs are made annually, compared to about 120,000 litigation proceedings in Croatian courts.
However, the initial transformation from a marginal to an omnipresent procedural tool may very well turn into the opposite direction. This paper describes the internal and external pressures on redefinition, reorganization, reduction and possible abandonment of notarial enforcement orders. The emphasis is, however, placed on the European dimension. After an announcement by the Croatian government of its plans to reform the EOTDs in order to address the concerns raised by CJEU decisions in the Pula parking and Zulfikarpašić cases, another set of CJEU decisions may affect the governmental plans. In this paper, the author specifically analyses the CJEU decision in the Polish case Profi Credit Polska (C-176/17), in which the Court found that the Polish payment order procedure is incompatible with European standards of consumer protection against unfair contract terms contained in EU Directive 93/13. This case is significant for Croatian notarial enforcement orders due to the fact that it raises for the first time the issue of compatibility of payment orders with the ex officio duty to shield consumers against unfair contract terms in a transition country, but also due to functional and procedural similarities of the Polish payment orders with the Croatian EOTDs.
The result of the analysis indicates that, if a Croatian court were to request a preliminary ruling, the CJEU would easily find EOTDs equally incompatible with the European procedural guarantees of effective consumer protection. By reference to recent studies produced for the EC, the author discusses how other jurisdictions in the Member States deal with similar problems. In the concluding part, the paper presents potential implications for the current process of the EOTDs reform and presents issues and possible solutions which could balance out the need for an effective system of certification of uncontested debt with the European procedural standards of consumer protection.
Ključne riječi
payment order; enforcement based on ‘trustworthy’ documents; notarial enforcement orders; consumer protection; unfair terms of consumer contracts; civil procedure; European law; Court of Justice of the EU; Europeanization
Hrčak ID:
216249
URI
Datum izdavanja:
31.12.2018.
Posjeta: 2.262 *