Guarantee Law for Sales of Goods (Directive)

Due to reasons of cost, traders refrain from offering their goods across borders and consumers shy away from purchasing in other countries due to legal uncertainty. The Commission wants to change this by way of a Directive. It wants to remove barriers in cross-border trade with extensive full-harmonisation of guarantee law for sales of goods.

cepPolicyBrief

cep welcomes this approach. The Directive unifies substantial areas of consumer guarantee law for sales of goods and thus reduces barriers in cross-border trade. On the positive side, the amended version of the Directive now provides uniform provisions on distance selling and conventional retail trade and thus avoids distortions of competition between the two sales channels. In cep’s view, however, the Directive contains numerous ambiguities which will lead to legal uncertainty. In addition, it provides opportunities for abuse by consumers and must be brought more into line with the parallel proposal for a Directive on contracts for the supply of digital content.