Integrating National Civil Procedure and the (Sustainable) Protection of EU Consumer Interests

Over the past decade, the CJEU has – via preliminary references from national courts, identifying obstacles in national rules of civil procedure – rendered a line of judgments aiming to establish procedural safeguards for the enforcement and protection of EU consumer rights. These references concern increasingly significant consumer regulatory needs including those which pertain to general consumer contracting ((online) consumer sales and services) and those which have come to the fore in the post-2008 crisis context, concerning (largely but not exclusively) consumer credit. The paper firstly provides an overview of key (procedural) problems identified both pre and post-crisis across the Member States. It then examines the national and CJEU case law and critically analyses the development of one procedural mechanism: the power and subsequent obligation on national judges to examine of compliance with EU consumer protection ex officio. The paper assesses the reach, limits and problematic dimensions of this mechanism, in ensuring the effective and equivalent protection of Union rights. Two questions arise, concerned with sustainable consumer protection (that is, effective solutions to consumers’ regulatory needs and satisfactory protection). The first: why is this task deemed to be one for the national courts (driven by the CJEU), and what is the nature of justice afforded via this proceduralisation? The second asks what further transformations, reflected in new mechanisms of enforcement (with a focus on the shift between judicial and administrative enforcement), can be identified and the nature of the solutions offered. The paper concludes by identifying future research avenues.