Full text of the paper:
Proceedings of the Faculty of Law, Novi Sad
2024, vol. LVIII, no. 4, p. 887-923
working language: Serbian
Review paper
347.131.2 347.439
doi:10.5937/zrpfns58-55578
Author:
Nenad Tešić
University of Belgrade
Faculty of Law in Belgrade
nenad.tesic@ius.bg.ac.rs
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-9101-7371
Summary:
The Law on Obligations – ZOO (1978) has, thanks to its internal quality, survived to this day, not only in the Republic of Serbia, but also in all the states that emerged from the dissolution of Yugoslavia (with minor changes and adaptations). The analysis of certain legal institutes, such as statute of limitations, shows that the circulation of goods and services has developed significantly in relation to the time when the norms of the Law on Obligations were formulated and that their application in numerous cases requires more than mere grammatical interpretation. Norms on the one-year limitation period for claims (ZOO Article 378) are not exempt from fluctuations in judicial practice. In my work, I plan to refer to just such cases, which, due to their complexity, have reached the highest judicial instances in the Republic of Serbia and in the region of South-Eastern Europe. Some claims, such as those of a mobile operator for the delivery of mobile telephony services, can relatively easily be subsumed under the legal formulation “post office, telegraph and telephone claim for the use of the telephone”, even though the mobile operator is not a post office and despite the fact that modern “smart” phones do not even remotely resemble their predecessors from 1978. The same is true with the claim for the delivery of cable television signals via coaxial or optical cable, which can easily be equated with the formulation “claim radio stations and radio-television stations for the use of radio receivers and television receivers.” However, claims for the delivery of the Internet use service for computer use, independently or in a package with claims for the delivery of other services and the sale of goods (repayment of various devices in installments: a “smart” phone, watch, etc.) open up bigger dilemmas. Similar doubts appear with the combined collection of utility claims, for example, Infostan in Belgrade, Informatika in Novi Sad, etc. The question arises, does the legal term “claim for compensation for maintenance of cleanliness” include: sewage services, collection and transport of municipal waste, treatment of bulky waste and disposal of municipal waste, or is it even more complex, does the legal term “claim for compensation for delivered water” include the items cold water, compensation for the use of water resources and compensation for discharged water? What is the statute of limitations for building management and maintenance claims arising under the Housing and Residential Building Maintenance Act? What about claims for parking fees in public car parks
and similar? In addition to these doubts, in practice the question arose, does the claim for telephone service expire in the same period for households and if the service was delivered to legal entities? The foregoing points to the need to think about the reformulation of Article 378 of the ZOO during the possible reform of the law of obligations. It is important that the future legislative solution covers in sufficiently broad terms services that are current, but also claims from those services that today we can only guess based on the process of accelerated digital transformation of economic activities and society as a whole, for example, claims for compensation for the use of artificial intelligence, etc.
Keywords:
obsolescence. – legal certainty. – the principle of finality. – debtor protection. – services for household needs.