In his doctoral thesis, published by Bruylant (1), Benoît Kohl, a lecturer at the ULg, prepares the ground for the harmonisation of European building and property development law in the residential sector. Will ‘housing consumers’ soon be protected in the same way, simple and practical, from Scandinavia to the Balkans?

‘If an architect has built a house for another person, and has not made his work solid, if the house which has been constructed collapses and kills the master of the house, this architect will be punished by death.’ This extremely severe juridical rule constitutes article 229 of the Code of Hammurabi, a compendium of jurisprudence which the founder of the first Babylonian Empire had engraved, in cuneiform characters on a basalt column, around 750 years before Jesus Christ. Now exhibited at the Louvre, this megalith is well known amongst legal practitioners as being one of the most ancient sources of written law, if not the very first. A meticulous disciple of retributive ‘eye for an eye’ justice, the Mesopotamian sovereign also laid out in his article 230 that should it be the son of the owner who paid with his life for the architect’s fickleness, the unfortunate son of the builder would be bumped off in his turn.

This anecdotal detour through Antiquity demonstrates that people who contact a professional to have their lodgings built for them have for a long time held the attention of legislators, keen to protect them from the hazards of such an undertaking. Certainly in our times architects and business people no longer pay with their own lives for the errors they might commit in building a home, but the quite specific home building sector is still the object of particular vigilance on the part of the authorities. Special juridical systems have been put in place, in numerous countries, to ensure a particular protection to those who call on professionals when the building to be constructed is destined to be a home. This protection finds its justification in the fact that there is an imbalance between the ‘average’ citizen and the professional, because property developers are often able to impose their conditions on the client. But there is also an imbalance because it is the client who ensures the ‘pre-financing’ of the building: well before the structure starts to resemble a cosy nest the client is obliged to ‘pay to see’ the walls rise from out of the ground, with all the risks that entails in the development of the building site: delays in the work, the business going bankrupt, an unfinished building when there is an urgent need to move, etc.

(1) Benoît KOHL, Droit de la construction et de la promotion immobilière en Europe. Vers une harmonisation de la protection du consommateur en droit de la construction ? (preface by H. PÉRINET-MARQUET), Brussels and Paris, Bruylant and L.G.D.J., 2008.