The Consumer Rights Directive is under evaluation

Recently, the European Commission has published a roadmap in which it explains its program to evaluate the Consumer Rights Directive. This Directive was adopted in 2011 and became applicable in all 28 Member States as from the end of 2014. The aim of the Directive is to achieve a real business-to-consumer (B2C) internal market, striking the right balance between a high level of consumer protection and the competitiveness of enterprises. In particular, it stresses the importance of harmonising rules that apply to on-line and off-premises of goods and services (e-commerce) as well as to the provision of digital content.

The Consumer Rights Directive is important for the publishing sector, as it sets rules for contracts agreed by telephone, puts in place specific provisions for digital content and defines the conditions of and exceptions to the right of withdrawal. EMMA has been very active in the phase of preparation of the Directive by commenting on the developments of the text, notably to stress the importance of the exception from the right of withdrawal for magazine subscription in respect of distance contracts. We also worked extensively on diverse aspects related to distance contracts by telephone.

Against this background, EMMA is very interested in the evaluation of the rules as announced in the roadmap. The evaluation will assess how the provisions     of the Consumer Rights Directive have performed in regard to some key features of policy-making, such as relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, coherence and European added value. EMMA will carefully monitor the discussion and will actively take part to the evaluation process, which is expected to the finalised at the beginning of 2017.

For further information contact:

Amandine Hähnel 
European Affairs Manager, EMMA

amandine.hahnel@magazinemedia.eu

+32 2 536 06 08