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Through an ethnographic study of the policy of reparation to victims in Colombia, this article examines the processes of the production of expert knowledge along different scales and disputes of humanitarian bureaucracies in Colombia. These emerge from the institutional deployment of development and peacebuilding paradigms, at least since 1982, with the creation of the National Rehabilitation Plan (PNR), the Social Solidarity Network (RSS) in 1994, the Presidential Agency for Social Action and International Cooperation in 2002, and the Department of Social Prosperity (DPS) in 2011. With the subjugation of some paramilitary groups in 2006 (Justice and Peace Law), the Victims and Land Restitution Law in 2011, and the peace agreements with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - People’s Army (FARC-EP) guerrillas in 2016, transitional institutions associated with truth, justice, and reparation proliferated, and with them, specific bureaucracies and expertise. Thus, the article specifically examines the technical and political tensions between different professional and ideological configurations associated with the implementation of reparations policy and how these disputes are essential to understanding the moral and ideological dimensions of humanitarianism and development in Colombia. It also studies the role of cooperation agencies in inter-institutional strengthening as a specific dimension of the formation of the Colombian State. These articulations configure a moral economy of humanitarianism characterized by institutional experimentalism and the formulation of social projects, expectations, plans, and ideas that never reach the status of having been realized. This strips such policies of any transformative or emancipatory potential. Thus, from an ethnographic perspective, the article provides an account of the techno-political tensions of humanitarian bureaucracies at the middle scales of regional, national, and global institutional structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a descriptive-evolutive, dogmatic and comparative study on the collective processes of the European Union (EU). On November 25th, 2020, the Union adopted one of its most awaited legal instruments: the first legislation, that is supposed to create a European collective action mechanism for monetary relief. According to Directive 2020/1828 on representative actions for the protection of the collective interests of consumers, and repealing Directive 2009/22/EC, member States have to adopt the transposing measures by December 25th, 2021, and give effect to them on and apply them to representative actions that are brought on or after June 25th, 2023. The European movement for collective litigation started approximately three decades ago. It earned official European recognition in competition law in 2005, owing to the European Commission's Green Paper on Damages Actions for Breach of the EC Antitrust Rules, followed by the White Paper of the same title in 2008. From 2013 to the emission of the recent 2020 directive, the particularity of community collective redress and inhibitory guardianship has proven to be holistic, unlike the US class action model. This paper analyzes the three pillars of the European vision on collective redress seeking, namely: a) the extrajudicial alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, b) the regulatory and public policy mechanisms, and c) the collective processes or litigation. The interplay of these three pillars makes the European Union's view on the matter singular as it proposes a system of incentives, prudence and safeguards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Collective redress is currently the most common way to start proceedings involving a plurality of plaintiffs who suffered damages in the same event. When plaintiffs are located in a unique state, legal issues remain manageable. Difficulties arise when different states are involved. In light of the growth of international trade in the last few years, as well as the characteristics of the European Single Market policies, it has to be determined whether European laws are capable of responding to these situations, especially when its own citizens are affected. Additionally, the present paper analyses if victims have any other procedural alternative, focusing on the consumer law field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates important shifts in the way that rights are enforced in the EU. On the one hand, the Commission is increasingly withdrawing from centralised rights enforcement, initiating less and less infringement proceedings and shifting the bulk of its work towards more informal compliance management tools. At the same time, private, de-centralised rights enforcement is becoming more prominent, at least as measured by the amount of preliminary references submitted to the CJEU. The Commission actively supports this trend, and in effect outsources its own enforcement work to private actors, both individual and collective. The article outlines Commission efforts to facilitate private enforcement and discusses whether private enforcement can substitute for centralised enforcement. It concludes that all channels of rights enforcement have a role to play, and the loss of any single channel cannot easily be compensated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The black communities in Colombia, mainly those settled in the Department of Chocó, suffer serious violations of their human rights, both individually and collectively, due to the internal armed conflict. These communities have been uprooted from their territories which are used by the different armed actors for illicit cultivation and illegal mining. The present investigation is characterized by being descriptive, qualitative and having a documentary design. It describes the progress made in the process of collective redress for victims of black communities in the department of Chocó, the background and motives that gave origin to said process. It was evidenced, first, that the processes of elaboration and agreement of Law 1448 of 2011 and Decree Law 4635 of 2011, were made without observing the fundamental right to free and informed prior consultation; secondly, that the few advances that have been made to the process of collective redress for black communities in Chocó is mainly due to the lack of political will. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collective protection of consumer interests is a relatively new institut in consumer protection in Europe. The protection procedure started with the adoption of specific European Parliament and Council Directives, and the Recommendation of the Commission of the European Union. In some European national legislation, collective protection is regulated by the Consumer Protection Act, but it is also offered by adopting the special provisions in existing civil procedural laws regarding the protection of collective rights and interests. The expansion of the concept of collective protection has come under the great influence of the institute of class actions, which has its roots upon American legal system. The collective protection offers different types of redress, which do not envisage the same protection content. First subtype of collective redress is an injunctive collective redress, a legal mechanism that ensures possibility to claim cessation of legal behaviour collectively by two or more natural or legal persons or an entity eniteled to bring a representative action. Second subtype of collective redress is a compensatory collective redress, which is a legal mechanism that ensures a possibility to claim compensation collectively by two or more natural or legal person or by an entity entiteled to bring a representative action. In both cases, the entiteled entities that can bring a representative are established by law, and those are the subjects that within their registered or regulated activity, deal with the protection of established collective rights and interests (in Bosnia and Herzegovina those are: Consumer Protection Associations, Ombudsman for the protection of consumers, competent authorities of the Entities, etc.). Protection of the collective interests is essentially based on the protection of the collective interests of certain protected groups. Collective protection can occur in different areas, from the field of environmental protection, protection from discrimination, areas of protection of competition law, to the field of collective protection of consumers, all depending on the protected collective interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years there have been a number of cases of mass harm in Ireland, including contaminated blood products, army deafness, asbestos-related ill health, Pyrite damage, the Volkswagen emissions scandal and the recent tracker mortgage rate abuse by banks. It is natural that victims of such mass harm might seek a legal remedy through the courts. Ireland, however, is a common law jurisdiction that does not yet have an effective mechanism for multi-party litigation of mass harm. This is despite recommendations in 2005 by the Irish Law Reform Commission (LRC), 1 Ireland's principal public body for the investigation of law reform, for the introduction of a new litigation procedure in the form of a multi-party action (MPA). 2 Instead, occasionally the courts use a confusing array of alternative methods in cases where an MPA mechanism would have had an obvious role. This paper explores the phenomenon of mass harm and the role multi-party actions as a potential route to redress for such harm. It gives an overview of the current Irish mechanisms for dealing with mass harm and is illustrated by a number of cases exemplifying the problems associated with mass harm litigation. The implications that these difficulties entail for access to justice in Ireland are evaluated and the practical aspects of this procedural lacuna are illustrated. These are explored in light of the LRC Report on multi-party litigations and its recommendations. Finally, there is an examination of what may potentially lie ahead for multi-party litigation having regard to ongoing developments in other jurisdictions and European Union initiatives, together with the implications of the Aarhus Convention and related aspects of human rights. The paper concludes that optimum way of achieving collective redress requires a modern holistic approach. This requires an integrated model comprising a combination of tools from a range of solutions including regulation, ADR, courts, ombudsmen, and new techniques of collective redress. It would appear that MPA litigation is necessary as a remedy of last resort to deal with mass harm where other techniques fail to deliver collective redress and where there is therefore no alternative to the courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the course of 2013–15, there have been significant developments in the reform of class actions in Europe. The European Commission published its Recommendation of common principles concerning collective redress in June 2013, whilst the Consumer Rights Act 2015 – which was introduced into the United Kingdom Parliament in January 2014 and obtained Royal Assent on 26 March 2015 – contains a class action for competition law infringements. Although there is some ‘common ground’ between these legislative instruments, their divergences are far more legally significant, and comprise the focus of analysis in this article. Regarding the two topics of standing to sue, and the opt-in versus opt-out approach to forming the class, the approaches of the European Commission and the UK Parliament differ markedly, reflecting the deep policy, political and judicial divisions which have manifested in this area of reform for over a decade. The legislators have also ultimately chosen different scopes of application, with the European Commission preferring a ‘horizontal’ approach to reform, whilst the UK Parliament has pursued a sector-specific reform agenda. In respect of standing to sue and the opt-in versus opt-out debate, there are numerous sound legal and political reasons that manifestly support the UK law-makers’ decision to depart from the 2013 Recommendation. However, in respect of the horizontal-versus-sectoral debate, the topsy-turvy history of reform at both European and domestic levels has resulted, ironically, in both the Commission and UK policy-makers reversing the views which each had initially adopted within the past decade. Undoubtedly, as these reform measures demonstrate, the collective redress landscape is both evolving and controversial. [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]

On 28 June 2014, the Faculty of Law of the University of Sarajevo hosted a workshop entitled ‘Collective Redress in South-East Europe’, organised by the Law Faculties of the Universities of Sarajevo and Zagreb with the financial support of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ). The workshop gathered law professors from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro. The guest of honour was Ms Diana Wallis, President of the European Law Institute (ELI). Collective redress is a relatively new topic among lawyers in South-East Europe. While certain countries of the region have horizontal legislation on collective redress, legislators in other countries still hesitate to introduce this mechanism, ‘replacing’ it with different forms of organisational claims. Even in countries that introduced a collective redress mechanism, decisional practice is quite scarce. The novelty of the collective redress mechanism in the region of South-East Europe, as well as its relevance in the European Union, especially given the recent initiatives of the European Commission, incited the organisers to arrange this exchange of views between researchers from South-East Europe and the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In addressing the problem of collective consumer protection, it is essential to determine the entities that the concept refers to, define the consumers' collective interest and thereupon proceed with the collective redress procedure. Considering the diverse aspects of consumers' identity, it is rather difficult to discern their collective interests and designate a single entity to represent a variety of individual interests. The problem of recognizing the concept of collective redress primarily stems from the inadequate conceptual framework concerning the protection of collective interests. In cases where the claimant seeking redress is a consumer association, the judicial practice has always had difficulty in differentiating the interests of the association as a whole from those which may be interpreted as individual interests. The practical implications of failing to discern between the legal interest and the procedural legitimacy may give rise to ample problems in the application of collective protection. The crucial problems may be observed in the application of the collective redress mechanism, the lack of consumer awareness of being entitled to use this protection mechanism, extremely high procedure costs, the length and complexity of court proceedings, the insufficient experience of judges to deal with cases involving this subject matter, the lack of uniform regulation and a huge discrepancy between the national rules regulating this issue in the EU Member States, the language barriers and costs in cases involving crossborder compensation claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]