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Unfair Contract Terms Directive, Article 3 Unfair Contract Terms Directive, Article 4 Unfair Contract Terms Directive, Article 5 Unfair Contract Terms Directive, Article 5

The article presents the judgements of foreign courts on consumer credits in Swiss francs. The author summarises the judgement of the Croatian Constitutional Court of 3.2.2021, which ruled on the "constitutional action" of the banks against the judgement of the Supreme Court in the collective action in the "Franak" case. Due to the different temporal application of EU law, the decision is in fact less applicable to Slovenia ratione temporis in the opinion of the Constitutional Court.

Of greater importance is the decision of the European Court on Human Rights (ECHR) in the case of Antonopoulou v. Greece, 11 February 2002. In this case, the ECHR took the position for the first time on a consumer complaint against loans linked to the Swiss franc by a currency clause. In the mentioned case the consumer complained that she had had to repay to the bank an amount in euros that far exceeded the amount she had borrowed in Swiss francs. The Court noted that domestic law had afforded the consumer appropriate remedies by which to assert her property rights. Furthermore, under the terms of the agreement, she could have requested the bank at any time to convert the loan into euros and could have taken out insurance against an increase in the monthly repayments. The legal framework put in place by the State had therefore provided the consumer with a mechanism by which to assert her rights under Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 (protection of property) to the European Convention on Human Rights. The ECHR has explicitly emphasised that if a national court interprets national law in accordance with EU law and the case law of the Court of Justice of the EU, then human rights are not violated. In other words, if a consumer does not fight for his rights, he cannot assert their violation.

In Kiss and CIB Bank, C-621/17, the Court of Justice ruled that Article 4 (2) and Article 5 of Directive 93/13 must be interpreted as meaning that the requirement that the contractual term must be clear and in plain language, does not require that the contractual terms of the consumer loan agreement, which have not been individually agreed by the parties, specify the amount of management costs and payment fees charged to the consumer, their method of calculation and due date services provided in return for the amounts concerned. Under EU law, the assessment of the unfairness of the terms does not apply to the definition of the main subject of the contract or to the matching of price and payment for the services or goods exchanged, provided that the terms are in clear and understandable language.