1st ICAI 2020

International Conference on Automotive Industry 2020

Mladá Boleslav, Czech Republic

of lay people’s decision-making by eliminating the lay-element in civil matters almost completely. The impending ACP hearing is therefore designed as an entirely professional decision-making process. The above-mentioned phenomena are instrumental in allaying public fears of potential Americanisation of the local litigation culture. The abovementioned key factors are, sadly, often absent in the current public political narrative, affecting the whole paradigm of the upcoming Czech legislation. Any simplistic comparison of the isolated parameters of the law systems, such as US class action, not taking into the account the principal differences in fundamentals of the different legal systems, is dangerous and may lead to irrational ideological distortions of the legislative paradigm. In light of the above, the negative elements of US class action must be assessed entirely in relation to the specific differences of the legal culture and the rational concerns of the ongoing legislative discussion have to exploit the principle: “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t”. 3.2 The legend of EU legislation hurdles The search for Czech collective compensatory legislation proceeds simultaneously with the process of adoption of the DRA legislation. Even if the final version of European legislation involves some modifications, principal changes are not likely to be expected. The timing of both the EU and Czech parallel legislative efforts prompts the delaying tendencies exploiting the idea of advantages of follow-on from the national legislation. The argument of questionable conformity of the ACP with the future EU legislation, nevertheless, is to a large extent inappropriate. Based on the character of the proposal, the future final version of the DRA will not provide a detailed rigid regulation of the compensatory collective proceedings. The very purpose of the DRA is to provide for minimum standards of representative actions only. The Czech proposal in its current form meets all the DRA criteria. The differences between the two pieces of legislation in question are based on the fact, that the Czech approach goes some way beyond the minimum standards provided. The European approach to the compensatory legal redress is more paternalistic in comparison to the US class action concept. The representative actions are more utilised under existing European national legislation, frequently using specialised state organs or consumer protection NGOs. The group actions initiated and organised by the consumers individually are not the prevailing phenomena. The DRA principles reflect this situation by providing minimum standards of national compensatory legislation in the form of representative action. Under no circumstances, nevertheless, can it be interpreted as the limitation of national legislation in respect to the individually organised group actions. Similar misinterpretations frequently apply to the DRA’s limitation exclusively in consumer protection cases and in the possibility of an opt-in and opt-out system implementation. The DRA provides no restrictions in either respect. The opt-out system, however, is generally considered to be complementary to the main opt-in system of collective legal redress with the recommended application primarily to the small value cases.

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