Tools

The European Union boasts some of the world’s highest consumer protection standards. Its rules grant consumers legal rights and impose obligations on traders operating in the EU. Yet enforcement has long been a weak spot.

Insufficient enforcement allows traders’ harmful practices to go unpunished and leaves consumers without redress. As BEUC and business representatives have noted, this undermines EU competitiveness and creates an uneven playing field between compliant traders and those who ignore the rules.

Challenges to Enforcement

Enforcement faces growing challenges. A widening gap in power and resources separates large traders from enforcement authorities, which often operate under tight budgets and limited staffing. In the digital space, violations can occur rapidly and invisibly, allowing traders to profit before authorities can respond ─ sometimes years later.

BEUC calls for modernising consumer protection enforcement. While private enforcement improvements are addressed in a separate checklist, this document focuses on upgrading public enforcement, particularly through reforming EU Regulation 2017/2394 (the CPC Regulation).

Only a few consumers go to court when they have suffered from illegal commercial practice, as they expect the
proceedings to be lengthy and risky. The 2020 EU Representative Actions Directive (RAD) was a breakthrough to
help consumers go to court together. It requires all EU countries to have at least one collective redress mechanism
for consumers.
Despite some Member States being late transposing the Directive (as of October 2025, Bulgaria and Spain were
still to do it), consumer organisations have started using this new tool to seek compensation for groups of
consumers. Several BEUC members can do so as ‘qualified entities’, as well as BEUC itself.
Yet rolling out the Directive at national level is only a first step. This checklist sets out five key areas that EU and
national policymakers need to tackle for collective redress to be effective.

Consumers combining different transport modes do not currently benefit from harmonised rights at EU level, making them completely dependent on operators’ terms and conditions. The European Commission proposed creating a framework in 2023 and both the European Parliament (EP) and the EU Council have reached their positions. It is now essential that the final compromise delivers a high-level of consumer protection.

This two-pager sums up BEUC’s main recommendations for trilogue negotiations. For more information see our position paper.