Acta academica karviniensia 2019, 19(1):47-58 | DOI: 10.25142/aak.2019.004

THE ANALYSIS OF THE CASE LAW OF THE COURT OF JUSTICE OF EU ON THE UNFAIR COMMERICAL PRACTICES

Radka MacGregor Pelikánová

Metropolitan University Prague, Dubečská 900/10, 100 31 Prague 10

The EU ten years long strategy, Europe 2020, is coming up to its final assessment, including the interplay of both the competition and consumer protection in the internal single market. The pivotal legislative instrument in this respect, the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (“UCPD”), was enacted even before Europe 2020 and was supposed to lead to a full harmonization of the protection against unfair business-to-consumer commercial practices, regardless whether misleading or aggressive, by the year 2007. The judiciary answer whether this has been achieved and supports the EU is to be learned from the competent court - Court of Justice of EU. A deep research is performed to provide data for a holistic Meta-Analysis which comparatively and critically assesses this strong, but not yet fully settled, case law consisting of almost 100 UCPD cases, and to expose it to the legislative wording, official EU statements and academic press. The key hypothesis suggests that the study of this case law in the light of the legislative wording, along with the official opinions of the EU and academic literature, provides valuable insights and suggestions about the status quo of achievements of the UCPD and Europe 2020 as well as the commitment of the EU and the attitude of the ultimate stakeholders, Europeans.

Keywords: CJ EU, Europe 2020, UCPD, unfair commercial practices.

JEL classification: K22, K41, L15, O38

Received: October 5, 2018; Revised: November 12, 2018; Accepted: March 6, 2019; Published: March 19, 2019  Show citation