Page - 86 - in Austrian Law Journal, Volume 1/2019

ALJ 2019 Wolfgang Faber/Claes Martinson 86 I. The Banco Santander Case as an Illustration A. The CJEU’s Use of ‘Ownership’ in a Consumer Contract Law Case In its recent judgement on Case C-598/15 Banco Santander the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU)1 had to deal with the question of whether the Unfair Contract Terms Directive (UCTD)2 can be applied after the enforcement of a mortgage contract between a consumer and a bank has already been completed. In that particular case, the creditor-bank which had itself acquired the mortgaged apartment in a forced sale sued the consumer-debtor to vacate the apartment. The referring Spanish court, in short, asks whether it can disapply certain national rules of civil procedure in order to protect the consumer. This question is based on the referring court’s consideration that national procedural law did not allow for an ex officio judicial review of unfair terms3 in the foregoing enforcement proceedings and that the consumer-debtor had no possibility to raise a defence on the ground that certain terms in the mortgage contract were unfair within the meaning of the Directive.4 It is important to stress that, for the purposes of this article, we will not deal with the full set of facts of the Banco Santander case, nor will we deal with the full set of arguments taken into account by the Court in its decision. The focus will be on the role the acquisition of ownership – or in general the acquisition of a right in rem – should assume when deciding to apply, or not to apply, provisions to protect a consumer from the use of unfair contract terms. As far as relevant for that purpose, the facts of the case are as follows: A consumer took a loan to buy an apartment and agreed to secure the loan by way of a mortgage (hypothec) over this dwelling. The mortgage contract, apparently based on standard forms provided by the bank, stated that if the mortgage should be enforced under specific extra-judicial enforcement proceedings, the bank should be authorised to sign the contract of sale of the mortgaged property in the name of the consumer. It also stated a fixed value on the basis of which the mortgaged apartment should be assessed in order to determine the starting price in the 1 CJEU, Case C-598/15 Banco SantanderSA v Cristobalina Sánchez López ECLI:EU:C:2017:945. The judgement has not received much attention yet: There is an (uncritical) case note by Friedrich Graf von Westphalen, Keine Anwendung der Richtlinie 93/13/EG (missbräuchliche Klauseln) im Rahmen der Verwertung einer hypothekarischen Sicherheit, 3 ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR INTERNATIONALES WIRTSCHAFTSRECHT 75 (2018) and a short critical discussion provided in Wolfgang Faber and Astrid Graf-Wintersberger, Zivilrecht und Internationales Privatrecht, Schwerpunkt Verbraucherschutz, in JAHRBUCH EUROPARECHT 2018 (Günter Herzig ed., 2019, forthcoming). 2 Council Directive 93/13/EEC on unfair terms in consumer contracts [1993] OJ L95/29. 3 This refers to a vast body of CJEU case law, under which a national court is required to examine, of its own motion, the unfairness of a contractual term where it has available to it the legal and factual elements necessary for that task. See, e.g., CJEU, Case C-243/08 Pannon GSM Zrt. v Erzsébet Sustikné Győrfi ECLI:EU:C:2009:350; Case C-40/08 Asturcom Telecomunicaciones SL v Cristina Rodríguez Nogueira ECLI:EU:C:2009:615; Case C-137/08 VB Pénzügyi Lízing Zrt v Ferenc Schneider ECLI:EU:C:2010:659; Case C-618/10 Banco Español de Crédito SA v Joaquín Calderón Camino ECLI:EU:C:2012:349, and many others. For the application of this principle in (various types of) enforcement proceedings, see, e.g., CJEU, Case C-76/10 Pohotovosť s. r. o. v Iveta Korčkovská ECLI:EU:C:2010:685; Case C-415/11 Mohamed Aziz v Caixa d’Estalvis de Catalunya, Tarragona i Manresa (Catalunyacaixa) ECLI:EU:C:2013:164; Case C-470/12 Pohotovosť s.r.o. v Miroslav Vašuta ECLI:EU:C:2014:101; Case C-32/14 ERSTE Bank Hungary Zrt. v Attila Sugár ECLI:EU:C:2015:637; Case C-49/14 Finanmadrid EFC SA v Jesús Vicente Albán Zambrano et al ECLI:EU:C:2016:98. An extensive discussion of this line of case law has recently been provided by ANTHI BEKA, THE ACTIVE ROLE OF COURTS IN CONSUMER LITIGATION – APPLYING EU LAW OF THE NATIONAL COURTS’ OWN MOTION (2018); see also Kalev Saare and Karin Sein, Amtsermittlungspflicht der nationalen Gerichte bei der Kontrolle von missbräuchlichen Klauseln in Verbraucherverträgen, 2 JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN CONSUMER AND MARKET LAW 15 (2013). 4 See questions 1 and 3 as stated in CJEU, Case C-598/15 Banco Santander para. 27 and reformulated by the Court in para. 32.