UN國際物品賣買協約의 意義와 解釋原則

The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (Convention or CISG), to which sixty-three countries to date have acceded, is appraised generally as the most successful international trade treaty so far. The Republic of Korea will be a party to the CISG from March 1st, 2005. This article begins with describing a short legislative history of the CISG and it overviews several salient features of it including limitation of Convention and relationships to other legal systems such as international private law and the UNIDROIT Principles for International Commercial Contracts (PICC). Further, it discusses the impact of the Convention on private law system in the world and especially on the Korean civil and commercial law. On the other hand, the CISG has it's own principles of interpretation, widely different from that of domestic legal system. The domestic legal system is synthesized under a set of uniform legal ideologies, giving rise no special difficulties in interpreting of rules and regulations even when there are lacunae in the system. However, the uniform legal ideology is lacking in the Convention, and this fact causes various difficulties in interpretation of the CISG, resulting in retaining it's own principles of interpretation in it. It is generally accepted that these principles include such as "International character of the Convention", "Uniformity", "Autonomy of parties", "Practices of the parties and usages", "Good faith" and "Recourse to general principles of the Convention". This article analyses the meaning and application of these principles.