Redress and enforcement

BEUC welcomes today’s General Court's ruling upholding the designation of Amazon as a ‘Very Large Online Platform’ (VLOP) under the Digital Services Act (DSA). BEUC had intervened in the case alongside the European Commission to defend the European consumer views.

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).

Following a complaint by BEUC, the European Consumer Organisation, 21 major airlines have committed to stop using claims that mislead consumers about the real impact of flying on the environment. This was announced by the European Commission today, concluding a 1.5-year investigation by national consumer authorities.
BEUC launched the action in June 2023 with 23 of its member organisations and kept monitoring the market since then. An evaluation two years on, in June 2025, showed that airlines’ greenwashing was still rife despite some improvements

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.

This paper shows how the EU private international law, which is not adapted to cross-border representative actions, has in fact become a barrier to such actions. We suggest several solutions to make mass claims more manageable both for claimant organisations and the courts.

Two years after BEUC denounced airlines’ widespread greenwashing to EU authorities, the situation has improved but more still needs to be done. As the Paris Air show is in full swing, BEUC encourages the European Commission and the network of consumer protection authorities (CPC-Network) to keep investigating the airlines’ practices and agree on commitments to make their marketing more trustworthy.

In June 2023, BEUC and 23 of its members from 19 countries lodged an EU-wide complaint against 17 European airlines for greenwashing. Based on a new evidence-gathering and two years after we launched our ‘Green (f)lying’ action we found that:
• Some airlines have removed or changed their climate-related marketing claims. This
appears to be a result of the actions launched by consumer groups and other civil society
organisations4 as well as of the exchanges between airlines and consumer protection
authorities.5
• However, greenwashing continues to be widespread, and some changes have been
limited (such as light changes in the wording and/or colour codes). Consumers are overall
still being faced with the false impression that they are choosing a sustainable transport
method rather than a highly polluting one.
• Airlines’ green claims continue to rely on two key arguments: As shown in our 2023
action, claims mainly misrepresent the impact of the flight through reliance on ‘offsetting’
claims and oversell the trader’s future goals and plans.
• ‘Green fares’ are increasingly popular. The airlines which are part of the Lufthansa group
registered a steady rise of such fares, which grant consumers extra miles or loyalty points.6
• Regulatory contexts are getting stricter in Europe and beyond. An increasing number of
authorities and court decisions have clarified when and how climate-related claims can be
admissible.