Declaration obligations of the policyholder and legal consequences of its violation

ABSTRACT Insurance contracts are contracts that are in a continuous debt relation, based on mutu-al trust, and contain many rights and obligations for the parties. Honesty is perhaps the most important of the rights and obligations of the parties to each other. In accordance with the principle of honesty, the legislator imposes some disclosure duties on the policyholder, who has more information about the content of the risk subject to the insurance, just as the insurer, who is an expert in insurance, has imposed a duty to disclose. In other words, the legislator has brought mutual duties to the parties in order to bring the asymmetrical level of knowledge between the parties to a symmetrical level. Accordingly, the policyholder is obliged to notify the insurer of any developments that may affect the insurance contract and the risk, from the establishment stage of the contract (including the pre-contractual period) until the expiration of the contract. According to the information to be given by the policyholder, the insurer may not establish the insurance con-tract at all or may want to draw it up under different conditions, primarily the premium amount. Therefore, it is of great importance for the insurer to provide accurate information by the policyholder. In this context, the legislator has envisaged some regulations and sanctions against the policyholder who does not fulfill their duties, which may result in the termination of the insurance contract they have concluded, as well as not benefiting from the rights grant-ed to them by the insurance contract in case of the occurrence of the risk. In our law, the duty to disclose of the policyholder took place in three stages between articles 1435 and 1446 of the TCC. Unlike the former TCC, within this regulation certain " duty of disclosure" has been brought to the policyholder throughout the insurance contract. These disclosure duties stand out during the establishment of the insurance contract, during the course of the insurance contract, and finally at the stage of occurrence of the risk. On the matter of insurance contracts, within the reforming changes made in 2008 in the German Insurance Contract Law (VVG), articles were adopted that will enable easy reso-lutions for many disputes that may arise between the insurer and the policyholder. However, although the Turkish Commercial Code No. 6102, which was ratified on 13.01.2011 and came into force later than the German Insurance Contract Law dated 2008, took the old German Insurance Contract Law (a.F. VVG), which served for a century and was abolished by Ger-many as a reference instead of the aforementioned law. In this manner, our country has been deprived of this truly revolutionary law in terms of insurance contracts for several reasons. Thus, instead of reforming solutions for the legal problems, the legislator preferred the law, which was resolving the hundred years old legal disputes. Keywords: Insurance Law, Insurance Contract, Duty to Disclose, Risk.