Trends of European policies on ADR

European Commission has always been very active in promoting ADR procedures, by spreading their use and trying, at the same time, to make ordinary justice more efficient.

Therefore, the European Commission enforced two basic Recommendations on the principles applicable to the bodies responsible for out-of-court settlements of consumer disputes.

- The first Recommendation, n. 257, of 30 March 1998, invited Member States to draw up a list of national authorities entitled to deal with extrajudicial disputes and established seven minimum principles governing the creation and operation of out-of-court procedures for resolving consumer disputes (independence, transparency, effectiveness, legality, liberty, representation and adversarial principles).

- The second Recommendation, n. 310, of 4 April 2001, stated the principles for out-of-court bodies involved in the consensual resolution of consumer disputes.

Furthermore, on 19 April 2002, the European Commission issued a Green paper on alternative dispute resolution in civil and commercial law, to draw up a detailed inventory of the various initiatives and projects undertaken by the Member States and by the European Union and to point out the qualifications that ADR bodies must comply with.

Nevertheless, within the EU the ADR system have been developing in many different ways, concerning qualified bodies, procedures applied, the need to take ADR, the obligatoriness of the procedure and, finally, the costs incurred.

In order to simplify ADR dissemination, the European Commission created two networks of national bodies for the extra-judicial settlement of cross-borders consumer disputes (that are disputes which parties coming from two different Member States):

-         The ECC-network, with its 30 centres in 26 Member States, informs consumers about the purchase of goods and services and supports them in the event of a complaint or a dispute;

-          The FIN-network helps consumer to solve financial matters by entering an out-of-court settlement of disputes.