The CISG and Croatian Courts

Abstract

SUMMARY The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (hereinafter: the CISG) is undisputedly one of the most important and successful achievements in the global harmonization and unification of the law of contract. Eighty-nine states became parties to the Convention to support this claim which proves this fact (http://www. uncitral.org/uncitral/en/uncitral_texts/sale_goods/ 1980CISG_status.html.). The CISG had been applied by Croatian courts even before 1991, when the Republic of Croatia became the subject of (public) international law, because Croatia was part of the former Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, that ratified the CISG on 27 March 1985 with entering into force on 1 January 1988. After gaining independence, the Republic of Croatia notified its succession and the CISG entered into force in relation to Croatia on 8 October 1991 (Official Journal of the Republic of Croatia, No. 15/98). Without any exaggeration and based on facts, it can be said that the CISG is a particularly important source of sales law for Croatian companies. This conclusion can be derived from the scope of application of the CISG as defined under Article 1, the number of states that had adopted it, and the fact that companies located in the Member States are the most important foreign trade partners of Croatian companies (According to the data of the Croatian State Statistics Bureau, in 2017 Croatian companies were exporting an overwhelming value of goods to Austria, the Czech Republic, France, Italy, Hungary, the Netherlands, Germany, Slovenia, Great Britain, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Russia, Japan and the USA (https://www.dzs.hr/Hrv_ Eng/publication/2017/04-02-01_01_2017.htm). Although not all of them are Member States of the CISG, the applicable law for sales contracts is regularly the law of the state where the seller is located and this leads to the application of the CISG as the source of Croatian law.). This in turn led Croatian legal literature to pay special attention to the CISG, which resulted in numerous papers dedicated to the CISG (For an exhaustive list of papers published in Croatia see Tepeš, Nina: Mehanizam popunjavanja pravnih praznina u Konvenciji Ujedinjenih naroda o ugovorima o meðunarodnoj kupoprodaji i unifikacija prava meðunarodne kupoprodaje (Gap-filling mechanism in United Nations Convention on Contracts for International Sale of Goods and Unification of Law on International Sale of Goods), u Zbornik Pravnog fakulteta u Zagrebu 62, (1–2) (2012), page 670), but also to the application of the CISG by Croatian Courts. Although court disputes are undesirable, the number of disputes where the CISG was applied is proportional to the number of sales contracts to which the CISG has been applied.