유럽에서의 소비자 집단구제제도의 동향과 미래

Recently, consumer collective redress mechanisms have been discussed and developed institutionally in Europe – many European countries have adopted verbandsklage or class actions. Some European countries, however, do not institutionalize collective redress systems yet. In addition, judicial systems and regulations are different across countries. Accordingly, the problem of “Justice Gap” has not been solved so far. In order to resolve this problem, a unified European collective redress system is required. Although the European Commission(“EC”) proposed many policy suggestions, to make a unified regulation applicable in the entire Europe is difficult to achieve. In particular, each country’s different perspective and socio-economic environment makes it impractical to make the same collective redress measure that applies to all of member countries universally. Thus, an alternative – to adopt the U.S. class action system – has been discussed as well. Nonetheless, the U.S. class action system has been heavily criticized due to the concern of abuse including plaintiffs’ possible incentive to bring strike suits. In “Towards a Coherent Approach to Collective Redress” (February 2011), EC has studied the European unified regulations and principles on the settlement of consumers’ collective disputes. Then, through “Public Consultation Working Document,” EC evaluated that an introduction of a modified class arbitration would redress weak aspects of the U.S. class action system. In addition, it is expected that under a modified class arbitration, both plaintiffs and defendants would be treated in a relatively fair way. Furthermore, this modified approach – a combination of the U.S and European approaches – would prevent abuse of consumers’ frivolous suits. At the same time, the modified approach would give incentive to producers to be more careful when they sell their products. Most of all, under this modified approach, consumers would effectively deal with consumer protection problems together and manage the collective action problem although their damage is small individually.