Adopted in first reading by theNational Assembly with the unanimity of the groups, the bill presented by Laurence Vichniesky (Modem) and Philippe Gosselin (LR) that reforms the action of the group in France was finally buried by the government in favor of a text without ambitions that it gives the first time to the interests of large groups to the detriment of consumers.
To remember, the initial reform aims to simplify and unify the different regimes of group action in France. It was also the opportunity to transpose the 2020 European directive aimed at protecting the collective interests of consumers.
In any case, this reform was in no way revolutionary and in fact maintained numerous filters, not to mention real procedural “closures”, put in place from the beginning to stop the growth of the group’s shares, which are however necessary for the development of economic and procedural equity.
Reducing this reform to the minimum and putting behind MEDEF on the dangers for the business world, the government shows how blind he remains to the reality of the balance of power between producers and consumers and to the bad behavior of economic actors who do not hesitate to profit from his repeated violations of the law.
A reform without ambitions
In a catch-all text that contains various adaptation provisions to the law ofEuropean Unionthe government belatedly and partially transposed the directive creating a “cross-border” class action.
And again, as it stands, the government text reserves the use of cross-border action for “health” and “data” group actions only. Exit action to protect consumers, employees who are victims of discrimination or tend to repair the damage caused to the environment. It could be an admission of general policy that the The Barnier government ?
Another provision that signals the suspicion that weighs on the action of the group in the eyes of the government: verification of the absence of conflicts of interest of the candidate for the action. Deliberately ambiguous wording can seem very broad. If we can understand the risk of abuse of a group action used by a competing company, the provision presented by the government could lead, in a jurisprudential interpretation, to prohibit or limit the use of a third-party financial.
However, there is a fundamental inequality between groups with billions of euros in turnover and associations or unions that bring together a few thousand candidates. Here again, the government is blind to the reality of the balance of power at work and prefers to believe that group action can be a source of blackmail for companies that – perverse reversal of roles – will become victims of the consumers.
Let’s be clear, this vision of group action is outdated. It smacks of the 80s and does not take into account the developments particularly necessary for our times. A little as if we considered that the class action had harmed the development of the American economy. Worse, this pseudo-reform constitutes a political mistake and an economic error.
Political conduct
With the reform of group actionthe government could hope to rally very broadly and get the unanimity of Parliament. In those times, it was wrong to deprive ourselves of such an opportunity… But, beyond these purely tactical aspects, this text would have allowed us to affirm that the new government was concerned about the protection of consumers by providing them with a powerful weapon to enforce their rights and simplify access to the judge.
With its project, the government signs an act of surrender to special interests, those of industrialists and other polluters. It gives up fighting against moral risk and regulating the economy by the only logic that the “captains of industry” understand: the reinstatement of negative externalities and the reduction of their artificial profitability.
Economic error
But, with this reform without vision, without ambitions, the government is also making a serious economic mistake. The Malthusian vision of group action deprives the Paris market of an attractive instrument at the European level, as was the case in arbitration matters. Countries like Portugal and especially The Netherlands they understood it well and are trying to attract the European collective actions that are stretching on the horizon.
Therefore, this reform does not protect French companies of a class action European, but it will deprive consumers of the expertise of French lawyers; not to mention that this project does not prevent the transfer of substances, contributes to the evaporation of intelligence and will deprive the national economy of the reintegration of the gains made.
In other words, this text is counterproductive and undermines sovereignty by depriving French societies of the protection of their natural judge, while ceding the fate of French consumers to legal companies not inspired by the essential principles of the legal profession as affirmed in the lawyer’s oath: dignity, conscience, independence, probity and humanity.
We hope that MPs will succeed in improving this text to reintroduce – the least – some useful innovations contained in the Vichniesky-Gosselin project. But, even in this case, France will always be behind in terms of consumer rights, far from the “class actions” American countries that play an important role in the regulation (not to mention the moralization) of the economy.
