Description
There are the most children´s debts from the whole Czechia in the Pilsen region. Other, originally child debtors, are now young adults. The aim of the project is to stop immoral debt collection. An information campaign, individual legal assistance to clients and a lobby in courts and municipalities are key tools to help us achieve this. The campaign is to reach out to potential clients and offer them the legal assistance, legal representation leads to an individual suspension of debts and the purpose of the lobby is to obtain the data necessary for the general suspension of debts.
Summary of project results
There are approximately 3,000 children in enforcement in the Czech Republic. Most of them, almost 600, live in the Pilsen region. Others, originally child borrowers, are today young adults. Executions from childhood brought ten thousands of people into adulthood. The foreclosure map indicates that nearly 90,000 people in the 18-29 age group are currently in foreclosure. Child foreclosures are a European rarity, and the main causes of their occurrence in the Czech Republic are summarized in 4 points. 1) High remuneration of executors and lawyers motivating profit. Debts were also resold to private companies. Clientelism in the Czech Republic started an unlimited trade with debts, into which even children fell. 2) Due to the overload of the courts, which opted for legal legalism, there was no individual assessment of cases and the circumstances in which the children were at the time the debt was incurred were not taken into account. 3) The children did not have proper or no representation in court. 4) The text of the Civil Code does not clearly define the legal representative''s financial responsibility for his offspring. Entities that generated the most child debtors are: transport companies (driving without a ticket), municipalities (garbage collection fees), telephone operators (non-payment of contractual services), hospitals (regulatory fees for stay), libraries (fines for overdue loans). A young person entering adult life with foreclosure is socio-economically paralyzed, and foreclosures in general are a significant financial burden on the state. They lead to illegal employment, losses in the state budget, and administrative burden on employers who employ people with foreclosures. To illegal forms of livelihood and are a criminogenic factor, which brings expenses for prevention. Debt creates dependency on the benefit system and social services. They maintain the hostel market, the tense climate of society. The data is mainly based on our own social work and legal cases of our organization and People in Need.One of the aims of the project was to inform about the issue of child debtors through the campaign, or about the fact that it is possible to actively defend against the given injustice. The main goal of the project was to stop execution titles that were issued to children from the Pilsen region. The goal was based on the already implemented pilot procedure of addressing individual key entities responsible for child executions. In order to stop child executions, these entities were offered conciliation proceedings, i.e. stopping the execution by agreement. If the entities do not want to come to an agreement, it was possible to file a lawsuit for confusion and, at the same time, a constitutional complaint. The success of the given procedure was evidenced by the current constitutional complaint in the case of a child debtor, which led to a recently announced constitutional finding that changes the jurisprudence and perspective on the issue of child debtors to their benefit. The goal of the project was to expand the pilot procedure and its effects on the entire target population.The project clearly helped the legislative changes in the law, which regulates children''s debts. We consider this step a great success of the project. Unfortunately, it doesn''t solve completelythe issue of children''s debts, since it only deals with their creation, which is no longer possible at the moment. The amendment treats already ongoing child foreclosures poorly and applies that the debtor still must act proactively. Nevertheless, we subjectively assess the project as very successful, even at the level of individuals, whose living standards will improve significantly after we stoppedongoing foreclosure from childhood.At the same time, thanks to the possibility of individually stopping child executions, it helped individual clients, whose debt burden was thus reduced.In individual representation, it was possible to stop 14 executions for 11 children, the municipalities of Blovice and Rokycany each confirmed 1 stopped execution, they continued to stop executions after that, but we do not have specific numbers available. In the same way, we do not have data from the University Hospital in Pilsen, where, after a long negotiation, they started to stop the foreclosures (we have a credit note from the beginning of the foreclosure). Furthermore, they started to stop executions in Tachov, we also have a letter of credit available.