The European Parliament’s internal market and consumer protection committee fully backs closer cooperation among the appropriate national authorities to provide better protection of EU consumers’ rights against online or cross-border scams by unscrupulous traders.
In Brussels on Tuesday 21 March, the committee supported the draft regulation on this issue, strengthening and clarifying the Commission proposal on which the Council came to political agreement on 20 February (see EUROPE 11729)
“The cornerstone of the revised rules consists of a set of investigation and enforcement powers for competent authorities in all member states, with a possibility of redress for consumers. We also call for better involvement of all entities with legitimate interests in consumer protection, in particular consumer organisations, when tackling infringements”, said rapporteur Olga Sehnalova (S&D, Czech Republic. Voting 33 to 2, with 1 abstention, the committee gave her a mandate to open trialogue negotiations to try to reach agreement at first reading.
Through their amendments, MEPs inserted safeguards to enable national authorities to order the suspension of a website, as an interim measure, only “where there are no other means available to prevent the risk of serious and irreparable harm to collective interests of consumers”. If, after a request by the competent authority, there is no “effective reaction” by the trader to put an end to the infringement, that authority could, as a last resort, order a hosting service provider to “remove content or close down a website, service or account”.
MEPs want the period for national authorities to impose sanctions, order a trader to compensate consumers and order the restitution of profits obtained as a result of infringements to be set at five years.
They defined widespread infringements with a Union dimension as those that harm “consumers’ collective interests in a majority of member states accounting together for at least a majority of the population of the Union” (the Commission had proposed a higher threshold, of three quarters of the member states, together accounting for at least three quarters of the EU population). MEPs clarified rules for launching coordinated actions and the European Commission’s role in this process.
They feel that consumer organisations and traders’ associations should be allowed to participate in the “alert mechanism” to notify reasonable suspicions, since they might know about possible infringements earlier than the authorities.
BEUC, the European Consumer Organisation, welcomed the vote. (Original version in French by Aminata Niang)