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This article examines the extent to which the European Small Claims Procedure (ESCP) has served the main purpose of the EU legislature to establish a legal framework to improve access to justice for creditors of cross-border small claims through a simplified, expedited and inexpensive redress mechanism. This article first analyses the implementation of the ESCP in Italy and Belgium. These two countries were chosen because of the authors' research on the Small Claims Analysis Net (SCAN) Project (The SCAN Project was initiated in 2018 as a two-year project with the fundamental aim of evaluating the efficiency of the European Small Claims Procedure within several EU Member States (France, Belgium, Italy, Slovenia, and Lithuania), besides raising awareness of this procedure among consumers and other judicial stakeholders. For the conducted activities as part of the SCAN project, see accessed on 24 February 2021). The second part of this article deals with the impact of this regulatory instrument on access to justice for citizens, in view of the principle of judicial efficiency. Finally, this article focuses on the possibility of using this instrument for collective redress, on the one hand, and linking this procedure to online dispute resolution, on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses Belgium's new consumer class action act (Act of 28 March 2014 introducing a consumer collective redress action in the Code of Economic Law), which entered into force on 1 September 2014. First, attention is paid to the three class action prerequisites: the violation of a Belgian or European consumer regulation or act, an adequate class representative (i.e., a consumer association or the Consumer Ombudsman Service) and the superiority of the class action mechanism. Subsequently, the exclusive competence of the Brussels courts and the opt-in or opt-out system are discussed. The procedure consists of four phases, which are analysed in detail: a certification phase, a mandatory negotiation phase, a possible phase on the merits of the case, and an enforcement phase under the supervision of a collective claims settler. The paper concludes that a holistic approach to tackle mass harms in Belgium is missing. The new consumer class action contains some procedural bottlenecks that could undermine its efficiency. Its biggest shortcoming is the lack of appropriate rules on funding and financing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]