PRESS STATEMENT - 21.03.2017

Today the European Parliament’s Internal Market Committee voted to give more powers to national authorities responsible for protecting consumers, such as greater investigative powers and being able to order a trader to pay compensation to consumers when traders have broken the law. The committee also wants consumer organisations to be able to formally alert national public authorities when cases of foul play are identified. The European Parliament is broadly in line with the European Commission proposal which was issued in May 2016 [1].

Monique Goyens, Director General of BEUC, the European Consumer Organisation, said:

“The European Parliament sees the value of better and stronger consumer protection authorities in a Single Market. More and more complaints by consumers relate to cross-border and digital purchases and, without better cooperation between national authorities, such illegal commercial practices are very difficult to address effectively.

“Consumer organisations are on the frontline when it comes to tackling unfair or fraudulent market practices. It is only right that they can also feed into the European alert mechanism for alerting law enforcement authorities. We welcome that the European Parliament wants this formally enshrined in the law.”

The vote today sets out the European Parliament’s position ahead of what are likely to be tricky negotiations with national governments. The latter have shown only limited ambition in improving the cooperation between national consumer protection bodies.

ENDS

[1] BEUC’s position on the European Commission proposal to reform the Consumer Protection Cooperation Regulation is here: https://www.beuc.eu/publications/beuc-x-2016-087_ama_strengthening_enforcement.pdf.