Functional Text: A Contract Clause

Legal Czech reads nothing like the language you speak over a beer, and that is by design: a contract must state who is obliged to do what, and what follows if they don't, with no room for the ambiguity that ordinary conversation tolerates. It achieves this with a compact toolkit — a reflexive verb of undertaking (zavazovat se), the agentless passive for stating consequences, past participles pressed into service as adjectives to compress whole relative clauses, and a conditional frame for provisions. This page close-reads a short but complete clause so that each of those devices becomes something you can name and reproduce.

The text

Čl. 4 — Povinnosti smluvních stran

Smluvní strany se zavazují plnit povinnosti uvedené v této smlouvě řádně a včas.

V případě porušení této povinnosti bude smluvní straně, která povinnost porušila, uložena smluvní pokuta ve výši 10 000 Kč.

Nároky na náhradu škody tím nejsou dotčeny.

Three sentences, and every one of them is built on a construction that everyday Czech would express more loosely. A friend describing the same situation would say slíbili jsme, že... ("we promised that...") and když to poruší, budou muset zaplatit ("if they break it, they'll have to pay"). The contract instead reaches for zavazují se, a future passive, and a participial modifier. Let us take them in order.

Smluvní strany se zavazují — the reflexive of undertaking

The subject is smluvní strany ("the contracting parties"): strana ("side, party") in the nominative plural strany, modified by the relational adjective smluvní ("contractual", from smlouva, "contract"). This two-word term is the fixed legal label for the signatories, and it recurs throughout any Czech contract.

The verb is zavazují se ("undertake, bind themselves"), the third-person plural of zavazovat se — a reflexive verb whose whole meaning is obligation. The reflexive se is not optional decoration here: zavázat něco (without se) means "to bandage / to tie something up", while zavázat se k něčemu means "to commit oneself to something". The se turns an outward action inward — the parties bind themselves. This is the legal register's preferred way to state a duty, weightier and more formal than musí ("must") or slibují ("promise").

The object of the undertaking is an infinitive: zavazovat se + infinitive = "to undertake to (do)". Here it is plnit ("to fulfil, to perform", imperfective — a continuing duty, not a one-off act), followed by the adverbs řádně a včas ("properly and on time"), the standard doublet for how obligations must be discharged.

povinnosti uvedené — the participle as a relative clause

Watch what uvedené is doing. The full phrase is povinnosti uvedené v této smlouvě — literally "obligations stated in this contract". Uvedené is the past passive participle of uvést ("to state, to specify, to list"), and here it works exactly like an adjective: it stands right after the noun it modifies and agrees with it. Povinnosti is feminine plural (accusative here, the object of plnit), so the participle takes the matching feminine-plural ending -é: uvedené.

What makes this worth pausing on is that a single participle is standing in for a whole relative clause. English can do the same — "the obligations stated in this contract" instead of "the obligations that are stated in this contract" — but Czech leans on it far harder in formal registers, and the participle inflects to agree, which English participles never do.

You can always unfold it into a relative clause with který — povinnosti, které jsou uvedeny v této smlouvě — but the participial form is tighter, and legal drafting prizes economy. The mechanics of these attributive participles, including how they agree, are set out on the passive participle as an adjective.

bude uložena pokuta — the future passive of consequence

The second sentence states the consequence of a breach, and it does so in the passive voice — because in a contract, who imposes the penalty matters far less than the fact that it will be imposed. The core is:

bude uložena smluvní pokuta — "a contractual penalty will be imposed".

This is the periphrastic (participial) passive in the future tense. It has two parts:

• bude — the future of být ("to be"), third-person singular: "will be".
• uložena — the short-form past passive participle of uložit ("to impose, to lay upon"), agreeing with the subject.

The subject is pokuta ("fine, penalty"), a feminine noun, so the participle takes the feminine-singular short ending -a: uložena. If the subject were masculine (trest, "punishment"), it would be bude uložen; if neuter, bude uloženo; if plural feminine (pokuty), budou uloženy. This agreement is the single thing English speakers most often get wrong, because the English past participle ("imposed") never changes shape.

Note that if the clause names who does it, the agent goes into the instrumental case: podepsána oběma stranami ("signed by both parties"). But legal Czech usually omits the agent entirely — the penalty simply "will be imposed", with no one named as imposing it. That agentlessness is a feature, not a gap: it states the rule impersonally, as if the contract itself acts. The full paradigm lives on the participial passive.

smluvní straně, která povinnost porušila — the embedded relative and the dative of the affected party

Inside the same sentence sits a genuine relative clause, and a dative. The penalty is imposed smluvní straně — the dative of smluvní strana, "to the contracting party". This is the dative of the party who receives the obligation or consequence: penalties, duties, and deadlines are imposed on someone, and that someone stands in the dative. English uses "on/to"; Czech uses the bare dative case.

The party is then identified by která povinnost porušila ("which breached the obligation") — a který-relative clause, feminine singular která agreeing with strana, and the past-tense verb porušila ("breached", feminine to agree with the subject).

v případě porušení — the conditional provision in genitive

The clause opens with v případě porušení — "in the event of a breach". This is the standard legal frame for a conditional provision, and it is built without any if-clause at all: v případě ("in the case of") is a compound preposition that governs the genitive, and porušení ("breach, violation") is the genitive (here identical to the nominative, because it is a neuter verbal noun in -í, which does not change in the singular). So the whole provision is nominalised: instead of "if a party breaches this obligation", the contract says, tightly, "in the event of breach of this obligation".

Legal Czech loves these verbal nouns in -ní/-tí (porušení "breaching", plnění "fulfilling", prodlení "delaying") precisely because they let a whole action be packed into a noun and slotted after a preposition, with no need to spell out a subject or a tense. It is the nominalising instinct that gives legal and academic Czech their dense texture; the pattern is developed on verbal nouns and nominalization. Where a fuller conditional is wanted, the contract can also use a kdyby-clause or a pokud-clause — see kdyby conditional clauses — but the nominalised v případě + genitive is the register's default.

nejsou dotčeny — the negated passive of the reservation clause

The final sentence, Nároky na náhradu škody tím nejsou dotčeny ("Claims for damages are not affected thereby"), is a boilerplate reservation. It is again a passive — nejsou dotčeny = the negated present of být (nejsou, "are not") plus the participle dotčeny ("affected", masculine-inanimate plural to agree with nároky, "claims"). The word tím is the instrumental of to ("by that / thereby"), pointing back to the whole preceding provision. This one-liner exists to make clear that the penalty does not replace ordinary liability. It is worth recognising because you will meet it, near-verbatim, in almost every Czech contract.

Common mistakes

Key takeaways

• Obligations are stated with the reflexive zavazovat se + infinitive: smluvní strany se zavazují plnit — the se is what makes it a commitment.
• The consequence is the future participial passive: bude
  • short participle, agreeing with the subject (bude uložena pokuta, feminine); the agent, if named, goes in the instrumental (podepsána stranami), but is usually omitted.
• A past participle (long form) modifies a noun like an adjective, replacing a relative clause: povinnosti uvedené v této smlouvě.
• Consequences fall on someone in the dative: pokuta bude uložena straně.
• Provisions are nominalised: v případě + genitive of a verbal noun (v případě porušení), compressing a whole condition into a noun phrase — the hallmark of legal Czech.