Procedural Mechanisms for Achieving Access to Justice

Abstract

If consumers in B2C e-commerce are granted substantial rights through a number of substantive mechanisms, as discussed in Chap. 5, while the appropriate procedural mechanisms to ensure effective enforcement are absent or insufficient, the rights provided will be meaningless in reality. To facilitate consumers’ access to justice, the credible enforcement of these substantive mechanisms through effective procedural mechanisms is essential. Due to the limitations of traditional private litigation, where an individual consumer dispute is often of a small value, an affected individual consumer will usually not litigate a small claim as his or her individual loss is not economically substantial enough to make initiating a judicial process worthwhile. This is especially true with those trifle losses or scattered damages cases where the accumulated damages are high and suffered by a widely dispersed group, but the damage to each individual consumer is very low. This situation has led to spirited debate on the question of what are the best tools for consumers’ redress. These tools should not be disproportionate to the economic amount at stake in a given case. To deal with this, various attempts have been made in various countries to design one or more sets of enforcement tool such as small claims procedures, collective or group actions, ombudsman and other forms of alternative dispute resolution. The question of whether these enforcement tools provide effective means of protecting individual consumer’s rights both through providing them with compensation and at the same time modifying corporate behavior to prevent or mitigate legal violations and ensure fair trading practices in B2C e-commerce, requires further careful analysis.