CROSS-BORDER CONSUMER COMPLAINTS IN PRIVATE INTERNATIONAL-LAW

This survey gives an overall view of how private international law deals with cross-border consumer complaints. Firstly, the procedural private international law rules are discussed. It is shown that the private international law rules still focus on judicial complaints handling. They do not take into account that at a national level consumer complaints are often handled in another way, for instance by an Ombudsman. Secondly, Article 5 of the Rome Convention and other conflict of law rules which are of interest to the consumer, are evaluated. Article 5 is criticized because of its limited scope.