Luxembourg, 16/09/2004 (Agence Europe) - The European Court of Justice has ruled that by opting for billing which lists charges only according to the type of charge and is not sufficiently detailed to ensure effective verification and control by the consumer (not listing date or telephone number), Austria has failed to meet its obligations under the 1998 Telecommunications Directive.
Article 14(2) of Directive 98/10/EC stipulates that teleph9one bills must be sufficiently detailed to ensure effective control by the consumer of the cost of a call, raising the question of what constitutes a sufficient level of detail.
The European Commission explained that Austrian consumers can only deduce that they have made a certain number of calls over a certain period, without being able to use the bill to verify and control their charges.
The Austrian government maintained that the information provided on the telephone bills allows anomalies or errors to be immediately detected by comparison with previous bills, and the Telecommunications Directive does not require dates or phone numbers to be listed. It also argued that it had followed the measures set out in a 1997 EU directive on the protection of personal data in telecoms. The Court does not comment on this.
The Court notes that under the 1998 Directive, 'without it being necessary to determine whether a standard itemised bill should take account of each of the factors determining the cost of each call, clearly, it cannot but be noted that, on the basis of the Austrian standard itemised bills, it is not possible to identify, within the different tariff bands, each call viewed individually and, consequently, to check that it was in fact made.' This alone is sufficient reason for rejecting the type of billing in question.
The 1998 EU Directive was transposed into Austrian law through the Telekommunikationsgesetz (TKG 10/1997) (a federal law) and four decrees.