Lawmakers to Consider E.U.-Wide Consumer Code

BERLIN — The European Commission will introduce a proposal Tuesday to streamline consumer sales rules and protections across the 27-nation bloc, which supporters say could generate €26 billion a year in new cross-border sales.

The commissioner who will make the proposal, Viviane Reding, said a common sales law would eliminate buyer uncertainty and unnecessary legal costs for merchants, who typically spend €10,000 or more to adapt their sales contracts to each E.U. country’s national laws.

The guidelines would be optional. Both the consumer and the merchant would have to choose to make the transaction under the code instead of a country’s existing rules.

“The optional Common European Sales Law will help kick-start the single market, Europe’s engine for economic growth,” Mrs. Reding said in a statement provided by her office. “It will provide firms with an easy and cheap way to expand their business to new markets in Europe while giving consumers better deals and a high level of protection.”

The proposal, which requires approval from the European Parliament and Council of Ministers, has generated controversy in Brussels, where a coalition of national consumer groups and legal societies, which advise businesses and consumers on the vagaries of national laws, has formed to block the proposal.

Ursula Pachl, the deputy director general of the European Consumers’ Organization, a group in Brussels representing national and local consumer associations, said an optional sales contract could undermine pro-consumer legal regimes that are already in place in much of Scandinavia and in countries like Britain and Portugal.

Ms. Pachl, who is an E.U. contract lawyer, said her organization was concerned that the proposed protections would be watered down in the legislative process, even excising the provision that allows consumers to opt out of the contract.

“Businesses will be discouraged from using the new, tougher, stringent requirements because of extra costs,” to adapt to the new regulations, Ms. Pachl said during an interview. “The protections will never reach out to consumers because businesses won’t choose to apply it. To make it attractive to businesses, they will lower the standard and undercut existing consumer rights.”

The harmonized sales contract would be available to European businesses and also to merchants from the United States and elsewhere doing business with E.U. customers.

The proposal has attracted an array of supporters, including large European companies like Nokia, and groups like Britain’s Federation of Small Businesses. On June 8, the European Parliament voted 521 to 145, with eight abstentions, in favor of a nonbinding resolution supporting an optional, E.U.-wide contract regime. Poland, which holds the E.U.’s revolving presidency through December, has made the proposal one of its priorities.

Mrs. Reding plans to present her proposal, the details of which were obtained by the International Herald Tribune, on Tuesday after the measure has been translated into the Union’s 23 official languages. She will also present the results of a commission survey suggesting that 73 percent of E.U. businesses are willing to use a common sales contract.

Consumer contract laws in the European Union differ from country to country, with individual members applying their own rules to issues like product returns, refunds and exchanges.

Those differences, and the costs of overcoming them, have limited cross-border trade primarily to multinational companies with the legal staffs to negotiate the maze, Mrs. Reding has argued.

In Europe last year, three million consumers attempted to buy products in the Union but were refused because merchants were unwilling to sell outside of their domestic markets, the commission said. In the commission survey, two-thirds of consumers said they avoided cross-border purchases because they believed foreign laws were too weak. In 2010, only 9.3 percent of E.U. businesses sold products across the internal borders of the bloc, the commission said.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=8a7ee9a0f6ed5f5ecb9e5abd31bcd6f5