The company to which EAE Business School belongs, EAE-Ostelea, has been ordered to return to a student the amounts paid for a training course that he could not take. And this is due to an aggravation of Crohn’s disease, a chronic pathology that causes inflammation in the digestive tract. The sentence represents a relief for the Chronically ill, those who suffer from long-term pathologies, as they may face difficulties in resolving contracts due to unexpected health complications.
In this case, the private teaching company defended that “there were no health reasons that prevented it from taking the course”, valued at several thousand euros, since the disease was “pre-existing”. For this reason, he demanded compliance with the contract, including payment of the almost one thousand euros that he had yet to pay to the student, despite the fact that he had not been able to continue the training due to an “unpredictable” deterioration in his state of health.
The process, quite bitter, since EAE counterclaimed against the student after being sued, has just ended with a final ruling, which agrees to the termination of the contract and the return of the amounts paid. In it, the magistrate Joachim Bosch He says that, otherwise, EAE would have obtained “unjust enrichment” by receiving the price of the course “without carrying out the training.”
As the student’s lawyer explains, Isaac Guijarro, legal director of Olympe Abogados, the purpose of the procedure focused on determining whether the aggravation of the student’s illness justified the termination of the training contract. Although EAE argued that it was not, the ruling states that “the severity of the ailments, progressive in nature, through disabling symptoms,” prevented him from taking the course. Therefore, “we are faced with unforeseen circumstances that have affected the fulfillment of contractual obligations.”
Throughout the resolution, the magistrate criticizes that the company did not contribute “medical documents or an expert opinion to minimize the severity of the symptoms, in the sense of proving that said pathology allowed the course to be carried out.” He did not even deny the verbal communications that the student had made to him “about the sudden impossibility of taking the course” nor did he question the written notifications to the same effect. “Our client told them that he couldn’t take the course because he felt terrible, that he wanted to give up, but the company said no, that the most they could do was extend the two-year period he had to take the course for another two years. Our client told them no because he didn’t know how he was going to be by then,” says Guijarro.
The ruling is based on the famous doctrine of the clause as things stand. This is a creation of the courts, which usually apply when there is an unforeseen change in the circumstances of a contract that requires it to be rebalanced so as not to generate disproportionate damages to one of the parties. For this, it is necessary that there be good faith and absence of fault in the affected person. In the case judged, “the aggravation of the aforementioned illness generates an enormous disproportion in the agreed benefits. The actor could not take the course, despite paying for it, and the defendant company would receive the price from it without carrying out the training,” the ruling concludes.