Further limitations to the scope of the Convention

73. The Committee considered a proposal that additional matters be excluded from the scope of application of the Convention. In this connexion, reference was made to national legislation designed to protect the buyer in instalment sales and "door to door" sales. Not all of these types of sale were excluded under article 2 (a) of the Convention, but national legislation, regulating these types of sales should nevertheless take precedence over the Convention.

74. The Committee did not retain this proposal on the ground that the Convention did not relate to matters of validity and that the question of whether the types of sales contract to which the proposal referred were valid would be left to national law.

Deletion of paragraph (1)

75. It was suggested that paragraph (1) be deleted since it was a declaratory provision which did not appear to serve any useful purpose. It was unusual for a Convention to specify the matters which it did not purport to settle.

76. Deletion of the provision was opposed on the ground that paragraph (1) served the purpose of preventing the Convention from overruling domestic law relating to the validity of contracts. In this connexion, reference was made to article 36 of the Convention relating to open-price contracts: the question of the validity of such contracts was, as article 7(1) made clear, left to national law.

77. The Committee, after deliberation, did not retain the proposal to delete paragraph (1).

Deletion of paragraph (2)

78. The Committee retained a proposal to delete paragraph (2) after having decided that the matter of rights and claims relating to industrial or intellectual property should be dealt with in article 25.

Decision

79. The Committee recommends to the Commission, that paragraph (1) of this article, now renumbered as article 6 should [page 30] be retained and that paragraph (2) should be deleted, and that, accordingly, the Commission should adopt the following text:

"Article 6

"This Convention governs only the rights and obligations of the seller and the buyer arising from a contract of sale. In particular, except as otherwise expressly provided therein, this Convention is not concerned with:
"(a) The formation of the contract;
"(b) The validity of the contract or of any of its provisions or of any usage;
"(c) The effect which the contract may have on the property in the goods sold."

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Proposed article on fraud

508. The Committee considered a proposal to review the decision of the Working Group on the International Sale of Goods which had deleted article 89 of ULIS (which provided that in case of fraud, the determination of damages was to be made by reference to national law).

509. This proposal did not attract sufficient support to be discussed in detail. [page 61]

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