WHO IS CONSUMER? DEFENDING A UNIFORM AND COHERENT LEGAL DEFINITION OF CONSUMER IN LAW NO. 24/96, OF 31 JULY

Abstract

The Consumer Protection Law, approved by Law No. 24/96 of 31 July (“LdC”), establishes in its article 2, no. 1, that “[c]onsidered a consumer is anyone to whom goods are supplied, services provided or any rights transmitted, intended for non-professional use, by a person who professionally exercises an economic activity to obtain benefits”. The legal definition of consumer is usually structured with reference to four elements: subjective (“anyone”), objective (“[to whom] goods are supplied, services provided or any rights transmitted”), teleological (“intended for non-professional use”) and relational (“by a person who professionally exercises an economic activity to obtain benefits”). Nowadays, this general and supplementary definition of consumer does not have any logical and systematic coherence with the one contained in special consumer laws, which have transposed several European Union (EU) directives into national law, nor with the orientation that has been adopted in decisions of the Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”) and even of our higher courts, not even with the definition of consumer used in the main continental European law and common law systems. Therefore, in the end, we will defend the need to change the text of article 2, no. 1 of the Consumer Protection Law, definitively delimiting the subjective element of the definition to natural persons, but also introducing changes in the other elements that compose the definition of consumer in the LdC, in order to explicitly cover other relationships beyond the consumer contract, to receive the criteria of predominant use and also to remove potential doubts about the requirements imposed by the relational element.