Projects / Programmes
Collective judicial redress in cases of mass harm sustained by the consumers and other groups of victims in Slovenia
| Code |
Science |
Field |
Subfield |
| 5.05.00 |
Social sciences |
Law |
|
| Code |
Science |
Field |
| 5.05 |
Social Sciences |
Law |
Access to justice, collective redress in the EU, collective action, collective settlement, consumer collective redress, new EU directive on collective consumer actions, Slovenian collective redress framework
Researchers (3)
Organisations (1)
Abstract
The Slovenian Collective Actions Act (CAA) was enacted in September 2017 and started to apply in April 2018. Collective redress available in Slovenia before the enactment of the CAA did not provide for any collective compensatory actions for any group of victims. Only specific types of non-compensatory collective redress were available in the fields of protection of consumers, health and the environment. The object of these actions was not the protection of the rights of the plaintiff, but of a certain third person, or the rights of an unidentified circle of persons. Most notable collective injunctive relief was available for safeguarding the interests of consumers under the Consumer Protection Act of 1998 that implemented the Injunctions Directive (i.e. Directive 98/27/EC and later Directive 2009/22/EC), but has to this date unfortunately not been applied in practice. As more and more mass harm cases were detected in Slovenia, and as collective redress became one of the focal topics within the European Union, the CAA was perceived as an urgently needed piece of legislation and a top priority of the Slovenian Government in guaranteeing access to justice. The general procedural mechanisms that could have to an extent served as substitutes for inexistent compensatory collective redress, i.e. joinder of parties, joinder of actions and model case procedure, however, require the filing of individual actions by the victims themselves and are not designed to meet the procedural needs in mass harm cases. Assignment of claims enabling victims to transfer their claims to a person collecting them in order to pursue them in his or her own name, has also been available under the general rules of civil law, but this mechanism, too, does not enable the filing of class or representative actions. The CAA was drafted in 2016 taking into account the European Commission’s Recommendation of 11/6/2013 on common principles for injunctive and compensatory collective redress mechanisms in the Member States concerning violations of rights granted under Union law, as well as best legislative solutions and practices of various foreign models. It introduced collective settlements and compensatory and injunctive collective actions. In three years since the start of the application of the CAA, three collective actions have been filed with the courts under its rules. One action for the protection of the workers' rights was dismissed in the certification stage while the remaining two that were filed for the safeguard of the consumers' collective interests, are still pending. On 25/11/2020, the European Parliament and the Council adopted Directive 2020/1828 on representative actions for the protection of the collective interests of consumers and repealing Directive 2009/22/EC which is the first piece of binding European Union legislation on collective compensatory actions, albeit only in the field of consumer protection. The directive has to be implemented in the national legal orders of the Member States by 25/12/2022, while the measures set out in it will apply from 25/6/2023. The purpose of the research project is, first, to analyze the existent collective redress in Slovenia, and to detect the challenges the parties and the judiciary have been facing in the application of the CAA. Proposals on how to improve the existent legislative framework set out in the CAA and its efficiency will also be drafted. For this purpose, comparative analysis of the status and effectiveness of collective redress in other jurisdictions will be made. The second part of the project will focus on the question of how to implement most appropriately Directive 2020/1828 in Slovenia taking into account the existent Slovenian collective redress framework, the experience in its drafting and application, the national framework of procedural and substantive civil law, in particular consumer law, as well as best practices in the implementation of the Directive in other Member States.
