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Providing
minimum guarantees for
Alternative Dispute Resolution
(ADR)
To ensure that out-of-court
mechanisms (ADR) offer all
parties involved a minimum
number of quality guarantees,
the Commission published its
first recommendation in 1998:
Recommendation
98/257/EC
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A couple of years later, the
Council noted in its
Resolution
 on a
Community Wide Network of
national bodies for the
extra-judicial settlement of
consumer disputes (13 April
2000) that many out-of-court
mechanisms fell outside the
scope of Recommendation
98/257/EC but nevertheless play
a useful role in resolving
consumer disputes. The Council
invited the Commission to
develop further criteria to
cover these cases.
Recommendation 98/257/EC is
limited to procedures where a
third party proposes or imposes
a decision to resolve the
dispute (such as arbitration)
but does not cover consensual
settlement procedures (such as
mediation) where the third
party facilitates the
resolution of a consumer
dispute by bringing the parties
together and assisting them in
reaching a solution by common
consent. The 2001
Recommendation
establishes common criteria
that these consensual
procedures should meet in order
to give consumers and business
confidence that their disputes
will be handled with fairness,
rigour and effectiveness. The
criteria do not prescribe how
such procedures should operate
but identify a set of
principles that such procedures
should follow in order to
ensure a common minimum
standard.
Each Member State notifies
the Commission the names of the
bodies responsible for the
out-of-court settlement of
consumer disputes which they
consider to be in conformity
with the Commission's
Recommendations. This
information is of interest not
only to consumers, consumer
associations and professionals
who wish to submit a dispute to
an out-of-court body; they are
also of interest to the
out-of-court bodies themselves
which can in this way
familiarise themselves with the
structure and operation of
their counterparts in other
Member States.
With this
database
of information the Commission
aims to shore up confidence
between out-of-court bodies in
the different countries and
hence promote their networking
and effective collaboration
with a view to resolving
cross-border disputes (the
objective being to enable
consumers to bring their case
before the competent foreign
out-of-court body via the
corresponding entity in their
own country).
Consumers can obtain
information and assistance in
using ADR schemes for resolving
cross border disputes from the
European
Consumer Centre Network
(ECC-Net), as from 2005 the
merged network that replaces
the previous Extra-Judicial
Network (EEJ-Net).
Useful
documents
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