Latvian consumer association develops CollAct digital tool for collective claims
The Latvian Consumer Interests Protection Association, with support from the European consumer organisation BEUC, has built CollAct, a tool that helps process large numbers of consumer applications in collective claims. It can already handle basic functions, but further improvements are still needed.
The Latvian Consumer Interests Protection Association (LPIAA), supported by the European consumer organisation BEUC, has developed a digital tool called CollAct for managing collective claims. It is intended for cases where unfair commercial practices have harmed hundreds of thousands or millions of consumers, as in “Dieselgate”. The tool reduces the administrative burden on organisations, and this may affect whether such claims are brought to court at all.
Why a tool is needed
Under Latvian law, a consumer organisation entitled to bring collective claims must itself collect and process individual consumers' claims. With around 1,000 affected consumers, this means many phone calls, emails and meetings. With 200,000 affected consumers, such a workload can become an insurmountable obstacle to bringing a claim.
With CollAct, organisations can process a large number of applications more efficiently and run collective claims on behalf of consumers.
Benefits for public institutions
The association points to indirect benefits for consumer protection authorities and the court system. With a tool like CollAct available, non-governmental organisations can take a more active role in protecting consumer rights and ease the load on supervisory bodies. In future, the tool could be linked to court IT infrastructure so that data is transferred automatically and in a structured form, which would make courts' work on collective claims easier.
CollAct can already be used for core collective-claim management functions, but significant improvements are still needed, and LPIAA continues to work on them.
Use in other countries
CollAct was built for an “opt-in” system, in which consumers who want to be represented in a collective claim submit an application to the consumer organisation. Such a system operates in many European countries, including Germany, France, Italy, Lithuania and Slovakia.
LPIAA is currently running a European Union co-funded project, CollAct SK. Under it, the association is helping the Slovak consumer organisation Spoločnosť ochrany spotrebiteľov (SOS) adapt the tool to the needs of Slovak consumers.
The publication is a sponsored article. Further information is available at www.pateretajs.lv.
