ARTICLE 24 AS A NORMATIVE PLACEHOLDER: THE CASE FOR STATUTORY REGULATION OF THE ESCROW MECHANISM IN THE ELECTRONIC COMMERCE OF THE REPUBLIC OF UZBEKISTAN

Shavkatov Jahongir Shuhratovich

Authors

Shavkatov Jahongir Shuhratovich Master’s Student, Tashkent State University of Law

Keywords:

escrow, electronic commerce, payment guarantee, Article 24, conditional deposit, consumer protection, civil law of Uzbekistan, comparative law, smart contracts, ex-ante mechanisms.

Abstract

The Law of the Republic of Uzbekistan “On Electronic Commerce” of 29 September 2022 No ЗРУ – 792 contains, in Article 24, an isolated reference to a “system of deposit of monetary funds” as a permissible mechanism of settlement in electronic commerce. The provision, however, is essentially a heading without substantive content: it does not specify the contractual structure of the deposit relation, the rights and obligations of its parties, the legal status of the depositary, or the conditions for the release of the funds. The present article examines this normative gap through a comparative reading against articles 860.7 to 860.10 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation and Articles 53 and 58 of the E – Commerce Law of the People’s Republic of China, identifies the doctrinal reasons for which the introduction of an escrow mechanism is both feasible and necessary in the conditions of contemporary Uzbek civil law, and formulates concrete proposals de lege ferenda for its statutory implementation. The author argues that the escrow construction, properly elaborated, would neutralise the temporal asymmetry between payment and performance that lies at the structural root of consumer-protection failures in online transactions.

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