The holders of rights and obligations in obligations or contractual relationships are legal entities. The parties to a contractual relationship are those who have expressed their intent to establish a mutual obligation. A legal entity is the bearer of rights and duties within a legal (contractual) relationship, a person who participates in the legal relationship or holds such a position. Legal entities are divided into natural persons (human beings) and legal persons (organisational social formations).20 The concept of legal capacity has the same meaning for legal persons as it does for natural persons. The legal capacity of natural persons is general and equal, while it is limited for legal persons. This limitation applies only to rights and obligations that cannot belong to legal persons due to their nature. This is the case, for example, with testamentary capacity, moral copyrights, and certain other strictly personal rights.21
Through legal capacity, the law grants an individual the ability to be the holder of rights and obligations and therefore the right to be a subject in law. By recognising legal capacity, the law acknowledges the legal personality or legal subjectivity of an individual. The ability to hold rights and obligations does not mean that everyone can acquire all rights or exercise them independently. The law recognises an individual as a legal subject regardless of whether they can acquire and exercise the rights and obligations they may hold. This issue is addressed by another capacity, namely legal competence (capacity to act).22
Natural persons acquire legal capacity at birth. Although civil law does not recognise legal capacity for a fetus, it provides a special legal status in certain cases to protect the interests of the fetus. In some cases, provided the child is born alive, certain rights can be acquired, though no obligations arise. Example: A child conceived at the time of the opening of an inheritance (i.e., upon the death of the decedent) is considered born if they are born alive.23 Therefore, a child who is born alive can inherit, even though at the time of the death of the decedent—when the inheritance passed to the heirs—they were still a fetus.24
The legal capacity of a natural person ends with their death. However, this does not mean that an individual’s personal rights, such as human dignity, physical integrity, reputation, and image, become entirely unprotected after death. Posthumous protection of personality rights (which can be enforced by the deceased’s relatives) is based on human dignity and does not cease upon death.25
Legal persons are artificially created legal entities, characterised by their status as social formations separate from the individuals-members-who comprise them. They possess their own assets, purposes, goals, tasks, and organisational structures, and their existence and legal capacity are recognised by the legal system.26 A distinction is made between public law legal persons, such as the state, local communities, public enterprises, public institutions, etc., and private law legal persons, such as companies, associations, institutions, cooperatives, and foundations, which serve to realise the individual interests of natural and legal persons. Legal persons acquire legal subjectivity upon registration in the appropriate public register and lose it upon deregistration. This means that the founding act establishing a legal person is not sufficient for acquiring legal subjectivity. The founding act must be followed by the legal entity’s registration process with the competent state authority, which verifies whether all prescribed conditions for establishing the legal person are met. The registration process concludes with the entry of the legal person into one of the legal entity registers, and only after such registration does the social formation acquire the status of a legal person.27
