UN Guidelines on Consumer Protection Working Group on E-­‐commerce Meeting 24 March 2014 3.00 p.m. (Geneva time) SUMMARY OF THE MEETING Participants: - National consumer protection authorities: Italy. - International organizations: UNCTAD - Academia: Universtiy of Dehli, N.B. This meeting was convened as a re-­‐run for participants who could not join the first meeting of 3 March 2014. Thus the agenda of this meeting remains the same as the previous one. Summary of the meeting: 1. Opening of the Working Group on E-­‐commerce meeting: Madame Nicole Nespoulous from the Directorate General for Competition Policy, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control of France chaired the meeting on E-­‐
commerce. Madame Nespoulous welcomed participants to this Working Group following the work programme proposed in the Second Ad Hoc Expert Group Meeting on Consumer Protection of July 2013. 2. Presentation of the Background, Work programme and Expected Output of the Working Group on E-­‐commerce The UNCTAD Secretariat thanked participants for providing their input in this Working Group. The goal of this group is to provide concrete proposals for the Secretariat Report to the VII UN Review Conference on the issue of the United Nations Guidelines on Consumer Protection (hereinafter UNGCP), and the availability of their revision. 1
In order to gather all opinions for a proposed E-­‐commerce chapter in the UNGCP, the UNCTAD Secretariat prepared a detailed questionnaire and its accompanying instructions circulated in advance. (Please see excel document: UNGCP_WG E-­‐commerce; and the pdf document: UNGCP_Instructions WG E-­‐
commerce) Participants are kindly asked to provide their views on E-­‐commerce by filling the said questionnaire and sending it to the Chair (Nicole.Nespoulous@dgccrf.finances.gouv.fr) and to the UNCTAD Secretariat (graham.mott@unctad.org, arnau.izaguerri@unctad.org). The deadline for receiving contributions is Friday 4 April. The first draft of this report is expected for June 2014. The Secretariat will assist the Chair in drafting the report, and it will contain concrete recommendations for a new chapter on e-­‐commerce. The second report will also be circulated for comments of consumer experts. The final Secretariat Report will be issued under the authority of the UNCTAD Secretariat, so participants are not engaging the official views of their States by answering the questionnaire, but rather participating at the expert level. Consumer protection experts will be invited to discuss the said report during a Preparatory Meeting (December 2014 or January 2015) for the VII UN Review Conference (November 2015). 3. Overview of the questionnaire and accompanying instructions The aim of the Questionnaire is to take stock of the best practices on consumer protection and e-­‐commerce worldwide through the excel sheet circulated among participants. The contributions to this questionnaire will be summarized in the Secretariat Report and the major trends will be identified so as to propose concrete recommendations for revision. In the questionnaire, the issues discussed in the Second Ad Hoc Expert Group Meeting on Consumer Protection are displayed in rows, while columns contain specific questions to every corresponding issue. This questionnaire also tries to present the most relevant international instruments (namely the OECD Guidelines) as inspiration for the revision of the UNGCP. Participants are encouraged to portray their national/regional experiences. The Questionnaire is indeed long and ambitious, so an exhaustive answer is not expected. Instead, participants are asked to answer to their best knowledge and only in those areas they feel comfortable. For more precisions, please see the document UNGCP_Instructions WG E-­‐commerce. 2
4. Questions & Answers Madame Nespoulous opened the floor for comments from participants, who thanked the Chairperson and UNCTAD for convening the meeting. One participant asked the UNCTAD Secretariat to circulate the links to the documentation that was discussed in the previous meetings, namely: (i) the OECD policy guidance documents on mobile and online payments (recently adopted), digital content products (being advanced); and an analytic report on participative e-­‐commerce (including social and collaborative e-­‐commerce); and (ii) the Korean Consumer Protection Regulation. The UNCTAD Secretariat reminded that these documents are not in possession of UNCTAD, and sometimes they are not even public, so it would send individual requests to concerned participants should they want to circulate the said links. 3