الإعسار في القانون المدني القطري: بين غياب التنظيم التشريعي وترتيب بعض الآثار

Abstract

The Qatari legislature has been very keen to provide effective legal protection to creditors from the risk of debtors’ failure to pay their debt. Such legal protection is granted to creditors in the Qatari Civil Code through the chapter “Creditors’ General Guarantee and Means of Its Protection.” The chapter does not include an insolvency regime as one of these means. In this way, the legal framework of civil insolvency in the Qatari Civil Code is different from that of most Arab Civil Codes. An insolvency regime, as a distinct part of a Civil Code, is supposed to deal with situations where the debtor’s assets are not enough to pay back the outstanding debts. Such a regime is supposed to have advantages over the General Guarantee and Means of Its Protection provided by the Legislature in the Civil Code. Despite the failure of the Qatari legislature to regulate civil insolvency primarily as a separate legal regime in the Civil Code, the Legislature uses the term “insolvency” in numerous places throughout the Civil Code. By doing so, it uses the debtor’s state of insolvency as a condition to pursue some types of lawsuits, such as “Indirect Suits” and “Actions for Invalidation of a Debtor (Acts).” In addition to that, the Qatari Legislature employs the debtor’s state of insolvency, and establishes some legal consequences based on the state of insolvency, concerning such important legal matters in the Civil Code as Liens, Delegation for Settlement, Insolvency of Civil Companies, and Civil Solidarity of Debtors. For all the foregoing reasons, the lack of regulation to establish a regime of civil insolvency has been a controversial issue. Thus, this paper aims to deal with this particular matter by finding out its reality, causes, and the resulting legal effects. The analysis will also involve a comparative study with the Egyptian Civil Code. It is hoped that the analysis herein will lead to desirable developments for the Qatari Civil Code that will establish a legal framework for insolvency that is inclusive and able to deal with various issues related to civil insolvency.