Biological Damage, as a Special Figure of Non-pecuniary Damage and Problems Encountered in Albanian Jurisprudence

Abstract

Non-pecuniary damage is one of the institutes of civil law that aims to protect and restore the rights of personality laid out in certain provisions of the Constitution of the Republic of Albania and expressly referred to in Article 8 of the European Convention on Fundamental Human Rights and Freedoms. Judicial jurisprudence has rendered non-pecuniary damage in the case of health damage, physical or psychological integrity in three separate types of damage: biological damage, moral and existential damage. The subject of this paper will be one of the figures of non-pecuniary damage, biological damage or otherwise called damage to health, being a matter of little or no treatment and the problems it faces in Albanian jurisprudence. One of the topics to be dealt with in this paper is the manner and criteria for calculating health insurance compensation, a topic that has met discussions about the actual value of the compensation or the value of the expected income that the injured party or relatives should receive from social insurance. In the provisions related to the value of the compensation coverage, insurance laws and bylaws foresee certain limitations, not only in the method of calculating non-pecuniary  damages, but also with regard to the minimum amount of insurance coverage by the insurance companies. Referring to Albanian court practices there have been cases where there has been discrepancies in the calculation of biological damage between the insurance companies and the court.