The European Commission recently published its annual report on the application of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights in 2012. The report contains a considerable number of references to consumer protection, notably on the topics of digital content and cloud computing services (consumer information and data protection), health care (the CJEU's judgment in Deutsches Weintor), the enforcement of existing consumer protection Directives (timeshare, consumer sales, misleading commercial practices) and effective remedies (Art. 47 of the Charter).
More facts and figures are available on the Commission's DG Justice's website.
The application of the Charter to cases that are considered to be of a private legal nature under the laws of the Member States, furthermore, raises some interesting questions. For a discussion of some of those, I refer to a recent paper by Dorota Leczykiewicz (Horizontal effect of fundamental rights) and one of my own working papers (Unchart(er)ed territory: EU fundamental rights and national private law).
