EU: BEUC criticises e-commerce proposals

Jim Murray, director of the consumer group BEUC, has criticised the EC’s e-commerce proposals. Mr Murray said that consumers should not have to deal with the individual laws of the 15 member states. He added that it was absurd to treat on-line consumers in the same way as consumers who go to the supplier’s country to buy products. He also suggested that the current proposal would jeopardise established consumer rights under international conventions, and called instead for the principle of the country of residence to apply to cross-boarder e-commerce. To guarantee the free movement of e-commerce in the single market, the Commission’s draft requires service providers to obey the law of the country of origin and prohibits other MS from restricting services, adopting country of origin and mutual recognition principles. The BEUC Director suggested that the EC should exclude consumer transactions from the scope of the proposal since for the time being there were too many complexities to be resolved.