Format Contract And Consumer Protection

Standard Form Contract (SFC) has been adapted commonly in the modern society since the 1850's, which has become an important transaction system of the modern society and played an important part in the economic life. However, the status of two parties in SFC is extremely unequal, and the SFC providers tend to stipulate unfair articles to impair the consumers' interest deeply and seek more profit. Therefore, this thesis focuses on how to deal with SFC scientifically to make SFC bring its function of promoting the development of economy into full play, and how to regulate SFC reasonably to clear up its defections and protect the consumers' interest and right. This thesis is composed of three parts as follows:Part I focuses on the SFC and its impact on the consumers. This part introduces the concept, features and classification of SFC. It points out that the providers usually stipulate unfair articles, while what the counter-party can do is to accept or refuse. SFC is the production of the modern social economic development and the root of its birth is monopoly. The use of SFC is in favor of simplifying the procedures, reducing the trading cost, distinguishing responsibilities in advance and increasing transaction safety, but its defections cannot be neglected, for example, in SFC, it often contains some articles that increase the consumers' responsibility while decrease the providers'.Part II focuses on the regulating means of the SFC adopted by foreign countries in order to protect the consumers' interest and their enlightenment. The author comparatively analyses the four common regulating means of the SFC adopted by foreign countries for the purpose of providing reference for establishing China's regulating system. The four regulating means are as follows: 1) legislative regulation, the basic means to regulate SFC; 2) judicial regulation, one means that thejudicial departments go through the SFC and decide if it is valid or not according to law under the request of the consumers; 3) executive regulation, one means that the executive department supervise and examine the content of the contract to avoid the use of unfair articles; 4) social control, including industrial self-discipline and the supervision of the consumer association.Part II focuses on the regulating means of the SFC adopted in China in order to protect the consumers' interest and their perfection. The author analyses the regulating means of the SFC adopted in China and their defections. 1) As for the legislative regulation, nowadays the legislation is imperfect, abstract, and unworkable, and the legislative right is being abused. All these impair social justice, therefore it is necessary to stipulate special law to regulate SFC and change the present situation of legislation by departments. 2) As for the judicial regulation, it is difficult to carry out because of imperfect legislation, the lack of judicial independence, and the low legal consciousness of the consumers, therefore it is necessary to distinguish SFC from administrative rules, to enlarge the scope of examination by the courts and to perfect the litigating rules. 3) As for executive regulation, there is not special department to regulate the SFC. Besides, some executive departments neglect the consumers' interest in order to protect their own interest, therefore, it is necessary to establish executive departments surpassing their interests, to reform the executive system of the public enterprises, to carry out '' operation without governmental interference", and to introduce competition mechanism. 4) As for social control, it is important to bring the functions of the consumer association into full play.