APPLICATION OF THE 1971 HAGUE CONVENTION ON TRAFFIC ACCIDENTS IN CROATIA

Abstract

The paper examines the Croatian case law where the 1971 Hague Convention on Traffic Accidents has been applied. Some relatively recent cases show that the Croatian Supreme Court applied the general conflict-of-laws rule on determining the law applicable to the non-contractual obligation of the Croatian Private International Law Act where it should have applied the 1971 Hague Convention. The most recent decisions from 2009 and 2013 indicate that, even after more than 40 years of application, the problem of basic understanding of the sources of private international law still exists. On the other hand, there are a number of decisions where the 1971 Hague Convention has been applied and in which some issues repeatedly arise. Most of them relate either to the application of Article 8 of the Hague Convention dealing with the scope of the applicable law or application of Article 4 of the Convention providing for exceptions to the main rule of the lex loci delicti commissi found in Article 3 of the Convention. The problematic decisions fall into the category of decisions applying the exceptions under Article 4 of the Convention. The decisions in which the court has applied Article 8 of the Convention show that Croatian courts have recognized the idea behind the provision (as explained in the Essén explanatory report), which was to give as wide a scope as possible to the applicable law.