The 1980 UN Vienna Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods introduced new standards of civil law regulation in the most dynamic area of relations developing and continuing in foreign trade. New concepts and approaches that were absent from the legislation of the Soviet period and included in the modern Civil Code of the Russian Federation have been consolidated, but as general rather than special rules, i.e. applicable to domestic supplies and sales. Among them are the category of “reasonableness”, withdrawal from the contract without recourse to the court as a normally used means of operational influence, the rule on a significant violation of the contract, giving greater importance to notifications that open up the possibility of additional legal reaction and adjustment of relations, etc. The mentioned Convention presents in detail the institution of damages, which is regulated, among other things, by provisions on determining the amounts of recovery depending on the price difference, actual or expected predictability as a condition for awarding damages, etc. Not all the norms of the Convention are accepted in the Russian Civil Code, although the very concept of civil damages is presented in the Code in a new, promising form. Nevertheless, neither State nor arbitration courts have yet used the full potential of the formulas included in the Convention and domestic legislation. A comparative analysis of international and national regulation allows us to see the overdue legal improvements of the two concepts. According to the author, the international nature of the Convention’s norms and their status as the lex specialis of national law determines the following order of interpretation: individual legal terms should be understood according to their meaning in national civil law or, in case of verbal discrepancy, close to the Russian meaning; the content of legal provisions as a whole should be derived from the cumulative meaning of the six national texts of the Convention, which allows you to eliminate semantic deviations due to an unsuccessful translation into Russian; The Convention should be applied based on established law enforcement practices in its member states. The autonomy of international commercial arbitration should not extend to a foreign doctrine and practice of application when a conflict-of-laws rule refers to the Convention, and they are considered as part of foreign law (art. 1191 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation).
Yuri Е. Monastyrsky (Wed,) studied this question.