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Mar 27
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RAISING THE LEVEL OF THE CONSUMERS’ PROTECTION THROUGH THE OUT-OF-COURT DISPUTE RESOLUTION

Dragan Vujisić, Borko Mihajlović

10.5937/PiP2002059V
ABSTRACT /

The level of consumers’ rights in the Serbian law has been considerably improved in the last years. However, the level of application and enforcement of these rights has not followed the trend of improvement of the statutory level of rights. The Serbian legislator has conducted several steps aiming to improve the application and enforcement of consumer laws. Some of the steps conducted are introducing the special civil procedure applicable only to consumer claims, improving the process of protection of the collective interests of consumers, as well as waiving the court fees for certain claims of small value. Yet, none of these steps brought the results that were expected. In November 2019, the Serbian Ministry of Trade, Tourism, and Telecommunications announced a new Draft on Consumer Protection Law. This Draft brings significant changes in the mechanism of the out-of-court resolution of the consumer disputes. These changes are a new attempt by the Serbian legislator to achieve enforcement of consumer law and accordingly the highest possible level of the overall consumer protection. The main changes concern mandatory traders’ participation in the procedure of out-of-court dispute resolution and making the entire procedure free both for consumers and traders. The authors in the paper analyzed the potential impact of these changes, particularly having in mind that currently, Serbia does not have enough resources, in terms of competent bodies for dealing with out-of-court dispute resolution. For that reason, the authors express some doubts regarding the success of the proposed change and argue that before the proposed changes are to be implemented, there are two prerequisites that should be fulfilled: 1) creation of the network of bodies competent to deal with consumer disputes in the out-of-court procedure, and on which consumers and traders may rely and to whom they can trust, 2) conducting of broad campaigns focused to inform and educate both consumers and traders about the benefits of out-of-court dispute resolution. Other than these two general remarks, the authors in the paper also provide certain concrete recommendations that could potentially improve the content of the newly proposed Consumer Protection Law.

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