Heating Contract Dispute Legal Countermeasures

Along with booming of our country economy the heating industry is extending, but unsound heating system, residents’ lack of legal consciousness and other practical factors do not adapt to the fast development of it. The pattern of "Heating Contract" was implemented and promoted in2010, during the implementation stage, there were neither perfect regulations of rights and obligations for parties, nor relatively sound legal rules nor regulations, so it was difficult to make an accurate legal judgment when disputes involved. So, researches of this article are mainly for the purpose of building and improving related laws and regulations of "Heating Contract" to make a little contribution to protect heat users’rights.First of all, chapter one and chapter two starts from the theoretical research of "Heating Contract", discusses the concept, nature of which by adopting method of induction and comprehension, then comes to the conclusions that "Heating Contract" is a kind of famous contract, differs from other contracts, and also has certain differences from " Power Supply Contract". Secondly, defines the subject of "Heating Contract" whose subject can only be the company which provides heat and the heat users, both administrative departments of government and heat resource developers can’t be regarded as subjects of "Heating Contract". Finally, discusses the problems of risk undertaking and responsibility of breach of "Heating Contract" by means of comparison research, and concludes that we should adopt strict liability principle as the form of undertaking responsibility and force manure as exemption reason for "Heating Contract".Chapter three takes typical heating contract disputes of agricultural reclamation area in Heilongjiang province as an example to discuss the types and characteristics of heating contract disputes, during the conclusion stage of which,"format" of heating contract leads to obstructions for heat users to exercise litigation rights when disputes involve; during performance stage when heating temperature can’t reach standard, difficulties of finding evidence of this for heat users is another major cause of heat supply disputes. The basis of court decisions and the onus proband allocation become the main factors of whether contradictions can be effectively solved.Chapter four analyzes the existing legal regulations of heating contract in our country through comprehensive comparison and integrates case facts in chapter3to conclude the lack of legislative level, which is embodied in few legal regulations of the heating contract, nonstandard contract concluding way, too format contents. In comparison analysis of Germany, Denmark and other countries in the aspect of legislation, system reform process, it can be found that these countries have advantages and what we can take as reference. For legislation, we suggest heating contract should be famous contract to make its nature clearer; for heating regime we suggest accelerating the implementation of heat metering method; for administrative means, the government should pay attention to create competitive environment instead of too much interference in the operation and management; for judicial solution we suggest that the court should strengthen the use of mediation, adopt onus proband inversion method as evidence listing, so as to solve the heating disputes better.