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Adoption Of Belgian Law On Collective Redress Procedure

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On 29 April 2014, the new Belgian law on collective redress (the Law) was published in the Belgian Official Journal. The Law enables the collective recovery from companies of harm suffered by a large number of consumers due to the same contractual cause. It lists exhaustively a wide array of legal bases on the grounds of which the collective redress procedure can be lodged, including the laws on market practices, product liability, competition, intellectual property, medicines, and defective products. Extra-contractual or labour law claims cannot give rise to collective redress.

The collective redress procedure can be lodged only by a group representative, who will be able to act on behalf of a large number of adversely affected consumers who may not yet be known at the time of the initiation of the legal proceedings. This group representative must be either (i) an established organisation protecting consumer interests (which in practice includes only the consumer organisation Test-Aankoop / Test-Achats), (ii) other specialised organisations with at least three years legal personality and a core business that is linked to the harm suffered by the consumer group, or (iii) the Federal Ombudsman for consumers (Federale Ombudsdienst voor de consument / Médiateur fédéral pour le consommateur) whose role will nevertheless be limited to the negotiation phase. Consequently, lawyers and other organisations not fulfilling the criteria provided for in the Law are excluded from representing consumers in a collective redress procedure.

The Law grants exclusive competence to deal with collective redress procedures to the Courts of Brussels. The...

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