EU Consumer Law in 2020 (preprint)

The paper presents an overview of the main developments in EU consumer law in 2020. It discusses the challenges for consumer protection related to the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, legislative developments in the field of collective redress and digital markets as well as selected judgments of the Court of Justice, with a focus on the consumer notion, unfair terms in financial markets and consumer protection in the platform economy.The French version of this contribution will be published in “Annuaire de droit de l’Union européenne 2020” (Éditions Panthéon-Assas, forthcoming).

The COVID-19 Threat: An Opportunity to Rethink the European Economic Constitution and European Private Law

Draghi’s short sentence appeased the financial markets and by and large the Member States followed the credo and established the Banking Union.3 The crisis to be managed had a limited focus – monetary and fiscal policy – with broad implications for the economy and society in the European Union (EU) and the Member States, however. In the potential euphoria surrounding new perspectives, it should not be forgotten that the current crisis management by the EU Member States relies on the full functioning of key economic sectors – food production and supply, banking, healthcare, transport, the Internet, energy – more often than not provided by multinational, transnational corporations, national incumbents and supermarket chains. There will be lessons to learn as to who will benefit from the crisis – Member State politics, national governments, multinationals, online business, transport of goods – and who will suffer: the EU as an institution, the European legal order based on the four freedoms and competition, national parliaments, small and medium-sized companies and non-essential economic sectors. In his letter to P. van Parijs, Rawls asks whether “meaningless consumerism” could be a legitimate aim for the EU and for a European society.10 Davies and Taguri highlight the societal and cultural implications of ever-increasing consumer choice in the Internal Market.11 The one-sided promotion of online business, which empties our cities and transforms physical communication into online orders, is just one visible expression of what is excluded from the toolbox of European law – not only to investigate potential gains in economic growth through increased efficiency and increased effectiveness of political objectives through fully harmonising European private law rules, but also to seriously look into their impacts on society.