Originally from Collective Litigation in Europe: Law and Practice – Preview Page

This chapter examines in some detail the new EU Representative Actions Directive (the RAD or the Directive).1 In conducting this examination, we also invite the reader to look beyond and to look ahead, thus introducing the rest of this book. By taking this approach, we are not attempting to diminish the impact and role of the Directive, which constitutes an official EU-level confirmation that collective litigation has arrived in Europe. It concludes years of debates and sets out the compromise benchmarks of principles, standards, and steps on which the EU Member States managed to agree. The RAD is the “end of the beginning” for collective litigation in the EU.  
Nevertheless, for all its comprehensive provisions and its impressive length, this long-awaited and much debated law is still quite a typical EU directive. It sets the objectives to be achieved by each Member State’s system. It left to each Member State the choice of how these objectives should be achieved, by enacting new legislation or amending existing rules.
The RAD requires all Member States to establish at least one procedure that allows certain qualified bodies (“Qualified Entities,”), mostly consumer associations, to bring compensatory and/or injunctive actions on behalf of a group of consumers. Although the key elements of the procedure are set out in the RAD, the procedure in its entirety, as established by each EU Member State, must fit within national legal systems and legal traditions. A fair number of aspects of this procedure are not regulated at all by the RAD and inevitably will be governed by the law of each Member State.