Should FIDIC standards become an inspiratiom for the Polish legislator in the area of regulation of service contracts?

Streszcz. w j. ang. s. 55

In Poland the serious efforts were undertaken to prepare the new Civil Code. The work that was continued for several years has resulted in preparation and publication of the draft first part of the Code. The work still continues on the detailed part of the obligations law. This paper is a voice in the discussion on creation of the future optimal regulation of service provision in Poland, including the services whose one or exclusive goal is to create a specific result. The paper presents some interesting, practically tested and widely used solutions that are offered by the FIDIC standards, different from the standards used under the Polish law. The paper discusses such issues as: the risk of unfitness of the agreed result from the point of view of the goal assumed by the employer/client, the duty of the contractor to warn the client on the faulty specification of requested result, the principle of sharing the risk of the breach of contract, the duty to minimize the negative consequences of the event being the responsibility (liability) of the other party, the right to terminate the agreement in case of the long term obstacle to provide the services, the issuing of the contract performance extension, the remedies for non-performance of non-monetary obligation, information duties of the parties during the performance of the contract, subcontract performance, the order and unilateral change of agreement, contract termination by client/employer, contract termination by a contractor. The international organization of practitioners FIDIC (the independentcontract engineers supervising construction works and services) regard the FIDIC standards as the optimal solution from the point of sharing rights, duties and risks between the construction contract parties. In many cases the FIDIC standards can be generalized in order to create the general rules applying to service contracts (not only in case of the broad range of construction services). The presented solutions definitely deserve to be considered as the alternative options during the process of seeking the optimal shape of the future Polish law. Subsequently this will require to make a detailed comparison between them and the present solutions used under the Polish law and the European projects of harmonization of the obligations law.