By a judgment of the 10th of July 2014, the European Court of Justice sanctioned the Kingdom of Belgium for, inter alia, imposing via the national legislation stricter conditions for the announcement of price reductions than those laid down in the Directive 2005/29/EC concerning unfair business-to-consumer commercial practices (the UCPD).
The Belgian law of the 6th of April 2010 implementing the UCPD provided that the announcement of a price reduction must refer to the lowest price applied through the month prior to the announcement of the price reduction. The law further provided that a price reduction must neither last longer than a month nor less than a day.
The European Commission brought Belgium before the European Court of Justice reproaching that the above mentioned provisions were contrary to the UCPD.
The Court agreed with the Commission and recalled that the Directive operated a full harmonization of the rules relating to unfair business-to-consumer commercial practices in so far as Member States may not maintain or adopt stricter rules, even where such measures were designed to ensure a higher level of consumer protection. Annex I of the UCPD draws up an exhaustive list of 31 "black" commercial practices which are deemed unfair and therefore prohibited in all circumstances, without the need to proceed to an assessment of their actual impact on consumers. The Court observed that such list does not include the practices referred to in the Belgian legislation relating to price reductions. Such practices should therefore be assessed "in concreto" on a case by case basis in order to determine whether they are unfair and may not be simply prohibited as such.
This ruling is in line with previous decisions of the ECJ in which the Court similarly ruled that national prohibitions related to combined offers (Judgment of the 23rd of April 2009, case C-261/07) sales with bonuses (Judgment of the 9th of November 2010, case C-540/08) and sales at a loss (Order of the 7th March 2013, case C-343/12) were prohibited by EU law.
The French regulations on the announcements of price reductions include restrictions that are similar to the aforementioned provisions of the Belgian legislation. Having regard to this decision, France is expected to change such regulations in near future.
