Distributed Governance of Life Care Agreements via Public Databases.doc (original) (raw)

The paper explores legal, economic, human rights and social aspects permanent life care contracts in Croatia, by which the provider of support becomes the owner of receiver's property. Monitoring of such contracts is rendered ineffective due to incapacity and old age of one party to the contract and lack of close persons and relatives involved; thus, different unethical situations may arise, such as people not receiving the support and nevertheless being evicted or moved away from their homes. This, however, harms their human rights and is unacceptable in a social sense in developed liberal democracies. One possible solution in a strictly legal sense would be to ammend the Obligations Act, and create a registry that would be available to interested persons, bearing in mind that those are essentially contracts of private law and thus not subject to public or administrative law. Thus the utilisation of distributed public governance and involvement of NGOs in the protection of human rights would be limited. On the other hand, in a purely economic sense, another solution could be the introduction of new types of insurance that would pit the life care provider against an insurance company, such as in 'longevity' or 'reverese life' insurance, and the introduction of an online solution for reverse mortgates and life care contracts (agreements).