Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-01-12-Speech-1-202"
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"en.20090112.21.1-202"2
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"Mr President, first of all I would like to thank the rapporteur, Mrs Weiler, for her report, the contents of which of course will be carefully considered by the Commission, but also to thank her for the comments she made regarding this procedure.
As the report mentions the need for information campaigns to raise consumer awareness of their rights, the Commission would like to inform the members of its recent ‘Is it fair?’ website which includes for example educational material on the blacklist of banned practices.
To conclude, the Commission would like to assure this House that it will continue to work closely with Member States to ensure adequate and effective enforcement of the directives on unfair commercial practices and misleading comparative advertisement.
The database containing national transposition measures and case-law will be set up this year and will serve as a useful tool in this respect.
The Commission fully agrees that it is now very important that Member States adequately transpose the new concepts introduced by the directive on unfair commercial practices and that national authorities also contribute to uniform implementation of the directive right across the EU.
As far as transpositions are concerned, two Member States are still late: Luxembourg and Spain; the Commission referred these cases to the Court of Justice in June last year.
The Commission also coordinated cooperation on transposition in order to avoid incorrect transpositions. Nevertheless, some problems remain in a limited number of countries mainly because of their reluctance to comply with full harmonisation. For those cases the Commission will not hesitate to launch infringement proceedings.
The report mentions the need to protect not only consumers but also SMEs against unfair commercial practices. On this point the Commission reminds the European Parliament that a full harmonisation directive on unfair business-to-consumer practices was already a very ambitious proposal which would have failed if its scope had been extended to business-to-business unfair competition practices.
It has been concluded from the consultation leading up to the proposal and from the deliberations in Council that there was little support for extending the scope of the directive to cover business-to-business unfair commercial practices.
As regards aggressive practices which were regulated for the first time at EU level through the directive on unfair commercial practices, it was considered that such practices occur almost exclusively in business-to-consumer relationships. Misleading business-to-business practices are already covered by the directive concerning misleading and comparative advertising. Such practices should continue to be regulated solely by this directive.
As regards enforcement of consumer protection legislation, the Commission will continue to coordinate enforcement actions through the consumer protection cooperation network.
In this context the Commission notes that Parliament’s support for the ‘sweeps’ as an enforcement tool. The Commission intends to further develop this mechanism and has planned a further sweep for later this year. Further to the request from Parliament, the Commission is also pleased to add that the forthcoming second version of the consumer scoreboard will contain data gathered during the sweeps carried out so far."@en1
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