Legal Measures for Consumer Protection against Unfair Commercial Practices: A Study on the Laws of the European Union and France

Abstract

At present, manufacturers tend to implement various types of promotion strategies persuading consumers to buy their goods and services because of the promotional schemes. In some cases, those practices might be deceptive and deleterious to consumers. This piece of research was conducted to outline how to rightly control sale promotions in Thailand. It tried to strike a balance between fairness and free trade. The researcher studied EU’s and French legal tools manipulating the scheme. From the study, it is found that EU’s and French laws on the issue are clear. In France, specific laws are put in place. By contrast Thailand has no law dealing with the issue in particular. Only laws governing advertisements, labels, and contracts are introduced. Moreover, civil and criminal sanctions available in Thai laws do not help in the process of redress and fail to deter manufacturers from constituting offences. The research, therefore, suggests that these methods should be implemented if unfair commercial practices problems to be solved; 1) A specific law controlling commercial practices should be introduced; 2) A guideline should be provided as to know which kinds of commercial practices are allowed; 3) A proportional criminal penalty should be imposed to reflect the benefits manufacturers gained by infringing consumers’ rights; 4) The legal consequence of contract deriving from unfair commercial practices and redress measures should be clearly provided.