European Parliament Adopts Collective Redress Directive For Consumers
On 24 November 2020, the European Parliament (the EP) adopted a Directive on representative actions for the protection of the collective interests of consumers (the Collective Redress Directive or CRD).
The proposed CRD was initially published by the European Commission (the Commission) in April 2018. The proposal was then examined by the EP and by the Council of the European Union (the Council), which entered into interinstitutional negotiations in January 2020. The EP and the Council reached a political agreement on the final text of the Directive on 22 June 2020. On 4 November 2020, the Council adopted its position at first reading, which has now been formally approved by the EP and has since also been published in the Official Journal (Directive (EU) 2020/1828 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 November 2020 on representative actions for the protection of the collective interests of consumers and repealing Directive 2009/22/EC, O.J. (2020) L 409/1).
The CRD establishes an EU-wide “class action” or “representative action”. It covers infringements of EU law which are harmful to the collective interests of natural persons in their capacity as consumers, regardless of whether those consumers are referred to in the relevant instruments as “consumers”, “travellers”, “users”, “customers”, “retail investors”, “data subjects” or otherwise. Accordingly, representative actions may be brought not only for infringements of general EU consumer law, but also of EU rules pertaining to the protection of personal data, geo-blocking, financial services, energy and telecommunications.READ MORE