ANNOTATED TEXT OF CISG
Article 86

(2) If goods dispatched to the buyer have been placed at his disposal at their destination and he exercises the right to reject them, he must take possession of them on behalf of the seller, provided that this can be done without payment of the price and without unreasonable inconvenience or unreasonable expense. This provision does not apply if the seller or a person authorized to take charge of the goods on his behalf is present at the destination. If the buyer takes possession of the goods under this paragraph, his rights and obligations are governed by the preceding paragraph.

Legislative history || Case law || Scholarly writings || Links to related articles || Words and phrases || CISG (full-text)

Guide to this article

• UNCITRAL outline of issues present
  
• Editoral analysis of this article with cross-references to related subjects [not yet available]
  
• Secretariat Commentary (closest counterpart to an Official Commentary on this article)
• Match-up of this article with the 1978 draft
(to validate Secretariat Commentary)
• Use of the Principles of European Contract Law to help interpret CISG article 86
  • Match-ups with Continental and Common Law domestic rules, doctrine and jurisprudence

• Roadmap to the legislative history of this article
• Legislative history of this article: long form
• Legislative history of this article: short form
  • Chronology of development of Article 86 at the 1980 Vienna Diplomatic Conference
• Summary of UNCITRAL legislative history
• Hague Convention antecedent
  • Article 86 match-up with ULIS
  • ULIS (full-text) and André Tunc Commentary on ULIS

• For further information on CISG case law (material not in this database), go to Unilex: click for a description of the contents of this service. Also of considerable utility are the compendium of case citations and the CISG bibliography contained in Michael R. Will, Twenty Years of International Sales Law Under the CISG: International Bibliography and Case Law Digest, Kluwer Law International (2000). Prof. Will's materials are presented on the CD-Rom edition of the database.

• Selected monographs and anthologies (English language)

• Comments on Article 86 from 1999 text by John O. Honnold [U.S.] [available in CD-ROM edition only]

• Comments on Article 86 from seminal 1986 text by Peter Schlechtriem [Germany]
• Comments on Article 86 from monograph by Jacob S. Ziegel [Canada]
• Citations to materials on this article in other texts (selected texts only)
• Selected law journal articles and other commentaries

• To identify relevant commentaries, go to Bibliography and Bibliography Search Form [preservation and remed* (stem for remedy/remedies) are search form entries you may wish to consider]

  Our bibliography contains thousands of citations in 24 languages; we encourage you to tailor your own bibliography search to the specific aspect of this article that you are researching.

Links to related articles

• Article 86 [Buyer's duty to preserve goods] is part of the section entitled, Preservation of the goods. This section contains four articles. For links to the other three articles, go to Annotated Text of Article 85 [Seller's duty to preserve goods]; go to Annotated Text of Article 87 [Deposit in warehouse]; go to Annotated Text of Article 88 [Sale of the goods]

Words, phrases and concepts

• "If the buyer takes possession of the goods under this paragraph, his rights and obligations are governed by the preceding paragraph" (86(2)). "Mrs. Kamarul (Australia) said that her delegations's amendment . . . was intended to make it clear in article [86(2)] that the buyer was obliged to preserve the goods if he had received them and intended to reject them, even in the case envisaged in article [86(2)], namely, when the buyer had taken possession of them on behalf of the seller in the circumstances set out in that paragraph. . . ." OR 399, para. 89 [OR = Official Records of the United Nations Conference on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods, Vienna 10 March - 11 April 1980, A/CONF. 97/19]

• reasonableness [86(1)]: In addition to being specifically mentioned in this article, reasonableness is a general principle of the CISG
  • For the definition of reasonableness recited in the Principles of European Contract Law and references to reasonableness in Continental and Common Law domestic rules, doctrine and jurisprudence, go to PECL article 1:302 and the comment and notes prepared for this provision

  • To drive home the correlation between the PECL's definition of reasonableness and the evident same meaning of this term to CISG legislators when they used the concept either specifically or as a general principle of the uniform law they drafted, see overview comments and comments that illustrate the similar manner in which this concept fits the CISG