The Legal Consequences of Unfair Contract Terms in Consumer Loan Agreements Valorized with Foreign Currency

Abstract

In recent years, the Court of Justice of the European Union has issued a number of judgments addressing the issue of consumer protection in connection with the use of unfair terms by banks in loan agreements indexed with a foreign currency exchange rate. Most of them have concerned issues of exchange rate risk and exchange rate differences between the purchase and sale rates of a given currency applied by the bank. This article analyzes the recent ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union in the Dziubak case, which was initiated by referring questions for a preliminary ruling by a Polish court. The article’s purpose is to assess the position taken by the cjeu in this respect and its significance for consumers in Poland. Particular attention was paid to the considerations with regard to the possibility of replacing unfair provisions with general provisions and assessing the consumer’s awareness of the consequences of declaring a contract invalid. The aim is to examine the issues that were dealt with by the Court of Justice of the European Union in the Dziubak case, including – in particular – the answer to the question of whether the issues discussed by the cjeu had already been considered in its previous jurisprudence and whether it presents new, previously unknown legal consequences of the inclusion of unfair contract terms in loan agreements.