By
Prof. Dr. Aurelia Colombi Ciacchi, Professor of Law, University of Groningen, Groningen Centre for Law and Governance
Jilles Hazenberg, Doctoral Research Fellow, University of Groningen, Groningen Centre for Law and Governance
This paper explores the social component of sustainability in a sector where the financial crisis has had a considerable impact in Europe -credit guarantees.
The first part presents a critical overview of the sustainability discourse. It highlights the imbalance in the ways in which the three components of sustainability are discussed in the literature.
The second part proposes a novel interpretation of social sustainability in the light of basic human rights, from the viewpoint of both moral philosophy and legal science. This paper submits that human rights and fundamental rights create obligations also upon private actors, albeit the nature and extent of such private actors’ obligations differ from state actors’ obligations.
The third part applies this human rights based interpretation of social sustainability to credit guarantees in which for the debt of a small or medium enterprise often a family member of the debtor provides a guarantee. It also provides a critical assessment on the recent case law of the CJEU (C‑74/15) in which the consumer status of such vulnerable guarantors was finally acknowledged at EU level.
This paper concludes with the consequences the contract laws of the Member States will have to draw from the proposed human rights based interpretation of social sustainability to make personal securities of vulnerable guarantors more socially sustainable.
