Brussels, 29/10/2015 (Agence Europe) - In amending its enforcement proceedings for mortgaged assets, following a ruling by the Court of Justice of the EU in 2013, Spain put in place a transitional provision that fails to respect consumer rights with regard to the time limit for challenging mortgage enforcement proceedings, the Court said in a further ruling delivered on Thursday 29 October (case C-8/14).
After the 2013 ruling (see EUROPE 10806), Spanish law amended enforcement proceedings for mortgaged assets, providing for suspension of the mortgage enforcement proceedings when the defendant brings an objection, based on the unfairness of a contractual term, within ten days. For proceedings in progress at the time the new law came into effect, a transitional provision allowed the parties a time limit of one month which began to run from the day following the publication of the law in the Spanish Official Journal.
The Court of Justice did not challenge the length of this time limit, finding it to be sufficiently long, but it was unhappy with the mechanism chosen by the legislature to start the time limit running, namely publication of the law in the Spanish Official Journal. Referring to the directive on unfair terms in consumer contracts (93/13/EEC), the Court said that this way of proceeding infringes the principle of effectiveness since consumers could not reasonably take advantage of a further opportunity to object to enforcement since they were not notified of it through the same procedural means used to convey the initial information, that is to say, individual notification. The Court thus observed that there is a significant risk that the time-limit will expire without the consumers in question being able effectively and usefully to exercise their rights through legal action because they are unaware of or do not appreciate the exact extent of those rights. (Original version in French by Jan Kordys)