Research On The Application Of Article 55 Of The Consumer Rights And Interests Protection Law In Insurance Contract Disputes

It has been advocated by academia that Article 55 of the Law of the People’s Republic of China on the Protection of Consumer Rights and Interests(hereinafter referred to as the Law on the Protection of Consumer Rights and Interests)should be applied to adjudicate insurance contract disputes over recent years.Although more and more parties demand insurance companies to compensate three times the premium or even three times the insured amount in lawsuits,the overwhelming majority of the adjudication results are rejected.It is pretty much at the discretion of the judge since no law in our country specifies whether the Law on the Protection of Consumer Rights and Interests could be applied to insurance contract disputes.Article 55 of the Law on the Protection of Consumer Rights and Interests cannot be applied if the legal relationship of insurance contract is not included in the adjustment range of the Law on the Protection of Consumer Rights and Interests,or the insurance counterpart does not belong to consumers,or the insurance company does not commit fraud.This dissertation tries to reveal the reasons why it is hard to apply Article 55 of the Law on the Protection of Consumer Rights and Interests to insurance contract disputes through literature analysis,interdisciplinary research,normative analysis,empirical analysis,comparative research and other research methods,exploring the adjustment range of the Law on the Protection of Consumer Rights and Interests,clarifying the concept of insurance consumers,analyzing the possibility and manifestation of insurance company fraud,and put forward revision suggestions according to insurance cases and foreign legislative experience for reference.This dissertation is divided into four chapters mainly as follows:Chapter one expounds the obstacles in the laws to the application of Article 55 of the Law on the Protection of Consumer Rights and Interests to insurance contract disputes at this stage,mainly including three aspects: the dispute over the adjustment range of the Law on the Protection of Consumer Rights and Interests,the ambiguity of the consumer identity of the insurance counterpart and the difficulty in identifying fraud of the insurance company as mentioned in Article 55 of the Law on the Protection of Consumer Rights and Interests in lawsuits.This chapter summarizes the background and causes of these obstacles and studies the causes.Chapter two focuses on whether the legal relationship of insurance contract should be included in the adjustment range of the Law on the Protection of Consumer Rights and Interests.Although there seems to be some truth in both sides,they both have defects in practice,so all or nothing seems unable to settle the dispute.In this chapter,the author proposes a method to identify that insurance products have the nature of consumption and uses this method to analyze current insurance products in China to identify various insurance products having the nature of consumption,and propose whether the adjustment scope of the Law on the Protection of Consumer Rights and Interests includes the legal relationship of insurance contracts.Chapter three focuses on defining the consumer identity of the insurance counterpart.The concepts of the insurance counterpart and the consumer already exist.The insurance counterpart has been used as the insurance consumer as the connotation and extension of insurance consumer is unclear,which virtually expands the scope of insurance consumers and increases the obligations of insurance companies.Combining with the views of the court in lawsuits,the author boldly puts forward the concept of the insurance consumer in this chapter through analysis of the connotation of consumer and the conclusion of the study on the nature of consumption of insurance products in chapter two.Chapter four focuses on identifying fraud of business operators in insurance contract disputes.Although current civil and commercial laws of China including the Civil Code of the People’s Republic of China,the Insurance Law of the People’s Republic of China and the Law on the Protection of Consumer Rights and Interests have corresponding criteria for fraud,these criteria are either hard to be applied to or impractical in insurance contract disputes.Combining legal provisions with insurance cases,this chapter makes further study on the criteria of insurance company fraud in insurance contract disputes referring to representative views of the court.